


Bifurcation

by spicedpiano



Category: X-Men (Movies), X-Men - All Media Types, X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: 5000 Word Sex Scenes, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - No Powers, Boston, Cambridge, Classism, Doctorverse, Emotionally Crippled Erik Is Fun To Read, Ethics, Eugenics, Gore, Honestly Charles What Are You Thinking, Introspection, M/M, Makeup Sex, Medical, Moral Ambiguity, Morality, Pathologists, Smart People Doing Stupid Things, Surgeons, smitten!Erik
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-28
Updated: 2012-07-29
Packaged: 2017-11-10 23:00:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 47,251
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/471658
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spicedpiano/pseuds/spicedpiano
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Bifurcation</i> - (n.) the splitting of a main body into two parts.</p><p>In medicine, a single mistake can mean the difference between life and death.  </p><p>For cardiothoracic surgeon Charles Xavier, a fatal error leaves him standing at a crossroads ... and at the mercy of the man he has not faced since their relationship fell apart thirteen months ago. </p><p>Dr. Erik Lehnsherr has a fearsome reputation.  Due to his incisive autopsy reports, he has gotten more surgeons fired in two years than any other pathologist has managed over an entire career.  But when an old enemy returns to Erik’s life, he must find a way to temper his pride -- or lose the man he loves, all over again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into 中文 available: [Bifurcation 生死中界](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4184907) by [Analgisia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Analgisia/pseuds/Analgisia)



> The beautiful [art](http://i.imgur.com/hyDVl.jpg) which inspired this fic was created by **tindu**. I am completely spellbound by her work and am very happy to have the chance to write for it.
> 
> Thanks to **afrocurl** , for her work as an alpha in helping me get the first several chapters off the ground. Thanks also to **Clocks** , for her tireless encouragement and our many late-night panics :D
> 
> Special thanks to **Subtilior** for going above and beyond the call of duty as both alpha and beta -- for the meta, the pickiness, and for catching every single one of my split infinitives. Her help has been invaluable, and all remaining mistakes are mine.
> 
> Love to the illustrious members of the XMRB chat room. It's been one hell of a ride.
> 
> \--
> 
> Content notes: medical gore
> 
> \--
> 
> The _Glossary of Terms_ for this work may be found on Livejournal [here](http://spicedpiano.livejournal.com/16273.html). If you're curious as to the meaning of any of the medical terms Charles and Erik use in the fic, they are all defined in the glossary!
> 
> \--

  


  


 

 

0.

“All right, Mr. Burns. I want you to relax, and count down from ten.”

A nod to the anesthesiologist, who begins to depress the plunger on her syringe of propofol. The patient blinks up at the white lights overhead and counts, voice muffled by the oxygen mask held over his nose and mouth. The surgeons wait, the scalpels and clamps and tweezers gleaming and untouched in their tray.

_… six, five …_

A soft, hitching sort of sound in the back of the patient’s throat, and then silence. Vitals are stable. The clock is set.

*

The way the light reflects off the green-painted walls casts a sickly hue onto the cadaver. Then again, ‘sickly’ would still be a far preferable state to the cadaver’s former inhabitant than its present status: which is ‘dead.’

The body is stripped bare. It was probably tall and imposing in life – but like this, naked and exposed on stainless steel, the effect is lost. Everyone is small in death, cycling back to the vulnerability of birth.

There is the flash of a camera bulb, and the pathologist speaks.

“Nigel R. Sullivan, _autopsia cadaverum_. 8:53 am. Erik Lehnsherr, presiding.”

\--

“Scope, please.” The lead surgeon extends his hand, palm-up.

*

The voice recorder is set down next to the cadaver’s head. “The deceased is a forty-one year old Caucasian male ….”

\--

They remove the oxygen mask from the patient’s face, allowing the surgeons to tilt his chin back and insert the endotracheal tube. The machines beep benignly in the background, keeping the man alive.

*

Small, clipped samples of hair and nails and dead skin, closed into small jars, sticker labels pasted over the lids and set aside on the shelf.

\--

The nurse smears iodine on the patient’s chest to sterilize the area, staining it rust-red.

*

(The medical students wash the body, of course. It’s scut work; no self-respecting pathologist would deign to pick up a sponge.)

\--

Skin, one will find, has the same approximate thickness and resistance as the peel of a citrus fruit. The blade of his scalpel splits it easily in the median sternotomy, the red line left in its wake as dewy and crimson as the flesh of a blood orange.

*

The first cut of an autopsy is the Y-incision, drawn from both shoulders to meet at the sternum and then pulled along to terminate at the pubic bone.

Incisions in an autopsy are pale and bloodless, and after enough procedures it no longer feels as if one is dissecting a human at all.

He likes the monotony of it.

\--

Once the retractors are secured, the heart is exposed inside the chest cavity. It beats weakly, the muscle visibly thinned and deteriorated.

Even so, it is a beautiful sight. Life, marching bravely on.

*

After sawing through the ribs, the entire chest plate may be lifted away at once.

\--

The heart is encased in a papery white sac, which the surgeon splits easily to expose the purple mass pulsing underneath.

*

Without the bones, the muscle of the thorax is limp and still, like so much raw meat. The skin is pulled back manually and snipped from the diaphragm with scissors, withering away from the long coils of intestines and sagging down toward the countertop.

\--

“Transecting the aorta. Clamp?”

The great vessels are not nearly so delicate as one might think, and yet they feel fragile in a surgeon’s hands, so easily mangled with the tiniest flick of the wrist. A single slip.

*

He slides his scalpel into the cadaver’s pulmonary artery. A thick, glutinous streak of blood clings to the blade when it is withdrawn.

\--

“Dr. Xavier, bypass is ready when you need it.”

“Yes, all right. Almost there – just one … _more_ ….”

*

“The visualized great vessels display extensive fatty build-up, consistent with the typical American diet.”

\--

The old heart is still and heavy when he lifts it from the chest cavity.

Someone takes in a shallow gasp.

“Jesus,” one of the residents murmurs. “Just look at the cardiomyopathy on that thing.”

*

“Heart weighs 11.2 ounces. Proceeding to excise the lungs.”

\-- -- --

It’s Charles’s favorite part, when they stitch the donor heart in place and shut off bypass, and he is able to see the muscle beginning to stir – and the heart begins to pump on its own, throbbing stubbornly away beneath his fingertips. The resurrection of life.

*

According to the patient’s chart, he was third on the list for a heart transplant, at the time of his death.

A new heart, Erik estimates, would have given another seven years at least.

Though, for what? Erik sets the heart onto the counter, a plump mass of dead meat. Seven years: it is time, but it is not resurrection.

It is postponing the inevitable.

\--


	2. Chapter 2

PART ONE

“Can honour set-to a leg? Or an arm? Or take away the grief of a wound?

Honour hath no skill in surgery.

What is honour? A word. What is that word, honour? Air.

A trim reckoning! Who hath it?

He that died o’ Wednesday.”

-William Shakespeare, _Henry IV, Part I_

1.

“Long day?”

Raven glances up from where she sits slumped at the cracked green Formica table in the hospital’s main cafeteria. She looks, Charles thinks, as if this is the first time she’s been able to sit down since yesterday. Her hair is starting to slip free from her ponytail, a few straggly strands casting their shadows on eyes are already swollen with fatigue.

“God, you have no idea,” she all but groans, dropping her head forward to press her brow against the heel of one hand. “Or – well, actually, I suppose you do. I don’t know how anyone survives being an intern; it’s like being hit with a truck over and over again every goddamn morning. A truck you voluntarily jumped in front of.”

Charles smiles his sympathy and pulls out the chair opposite her, though he waits for Raven’s assenting gesture before he sits. “If it’s any consolation, you look worlds better than I did when I was in your position.”

“Don’t be so humble, Charles. You probably breezed through your entire residency, just like you do everything else.” Charles manages not to arch a brow at that. A fraction of a second later, anyway, Raven continues: “This is my third pair of scrubs _today_. First pair got puked on. Second was fecal matter.” A grimace. “—Don’t even ask.”

“Wasn’t planning on it.”

Raven mock shudders, lifting her cup to down the rest of her soda in one gulp. “And of course, Emma is still being as much of an ass as ever. You know, I think she hates me. I’ve been on scut duty far too many times this week for it to be anything _but_ hatred. I thought I was free of that after I graduated from med school.”

“There’s always some kind of scut duty,” Charles says, peeling his orange, letting the pitted skin curl down toward the surface of his tray. “Only when you’re a resident, it’s paperwork instead of sutures.”

“When I’m a _resident_ , I’ll fob all of my paperwork off onto my interns.” A quick grin slices across Raven’s face. She shrugs a moment later and reaches for her fork, stabbing the plastic tines at the blob of jello in the center of her tray. “Well, at least I’m practicing medicine, I suppose,” she says. “It could be worse.” She stuffs the bite of jello into her mouth, chews, swallows. “So. Anyway -- how was _your_ day?”

“Better than yours, apparently,” he says. His own internship year feels decades ago now, all those daily stresses and anxieties buried under the pressure of a career. He does not tell her that he’d switch responsibilities with her in a second -- maybe actually get a full night’s sleep for a change. “I had a valve replacement this morning.” It is a relatively routine procedure, at least from the perspective of a cardiothoracic surgeon. To a surgical intern like Raven, however, he knows it sounds positively thrilling.

Raven reacts just as he hoped – her eyes go briefly wide and she sets down her fork before taking her second bite of jello. “Color me jealous,” she says. “And you couldn’t invite your favorite intern sister to assist?”

“Jean was up,” he says with an apologetic shrug. (The caf pudding does not taste nearly as good at noon, he finds, as it does at five in the morning at the end of a thirty-hour shift.) “Maybe next time.”

“Yeah.” Raven has finished her meal by now, for the most part, and reverts to pushing around what’s left of it with the end of her fork. “Come on, Charles. You have the ability to save me from scut. Use your power for good!”

“I’m putting in a stent on an aortic aneurysm later today,” Charles offers, though some part of him rather doubts that Emma will let Raven skive off to observe surgery. Once Emma gets her claws into someone (“character-building”), it is nigh impossible to force her to release them. “I know it’s not exactly _Grey’s Anatomy_ , but if you want, I can – “

“I want,” Raven interrupts. “Yes. Yes, I want.” She abandons the task of toying around with what’s left of her lunch and leans forward in her seat, wrists pressed so hard against the edge of the table that Charles is certain it will leave marks. Even, Charles thinks, if he were to warn her that the other interns in her cohort are likely to suspect nepotism (and will privately resent her for it) – well, he doubts she would care.

So instead he just smiles benignly and says, “I’ll let Emma know.”

She grins, the expression wide and bright, the same grin which had won him over all those years ago when she first arrived at the house, stepping out of the car in her pressed periwinkle dress and shiny Mary Janes – and Charles had wanted so badly to detest her with all the passion with which he loathed Kurt Marko and everything Kurt brought with him (from his slippery smile to his green cravat to his gleaming new BMW – up to and including the other, somewhat burlier half of the Marko offspring). But Raven had been – well, Raven, whom, as it turned out, was impossible to hate. Even their age difference had seemed inconsequential; they had latched onto each other almost immediately – after which point no one had quite managed to separate them again.

“Hey,” Raven says. “What are you doing tonight? I was thinking we could go to Alibi, have a few drinks, and you can tell me all about that modified Bentall procedure you did last week.”

“Sorry, I can’t.” Charles shakes his head. “I have dinner plans with – “

“ – some girl,” Raven finishes for him. “Yeah. I should have known.”

“Maybe this weekend?” Charles suggests as recompense. “I’m off on Saturday, if you don’t have any other plans.”

Raven shakes her head. “Well. Not really. I – “

A flat, high-pitched siren sound cuts into her words and they both reach for their pagers at the same time.

Raven gets there just a fraction of a second faster. “It’s you,” she says, her hand falling away from her belt. She is not entirely able to disguise her relief. No doubt she had suspected it was Emma, paging her for IV duty or more sutures.

“I have to go,” Charles says, the announcement plainly unnecessary as he tosses his crumpled napkin onto his tray and stands. “See you tomorrow.” He is gone before she has time to respond, dumping uneaten lunch into the trash bin on his way out.

\--

2.

The page came from emergency; Sean is waiting for him as soon as he steps off the elevator. The young intern’s eyes have gone a bit brighter than usual, excitement (or something else – something that Charles cannot quite place) making his freckles stand out even more than they usually do, dark caramel specks on cream.

“They just brought him in,” Sean says, falling into quick pace alongside Charles as they head toward Block A. “34-year-old white male, complaining of chest pain and dyspnea – but he went into v-tach in the ambulance and they haven’t been able to get him stable for longer than a couple of minutes ever since.”

Charles frowns. “Doesn’t sound surgical.” It is, of course, or they never would have paged him; more than anything else, he speaks in hopes of prodding Sean to share more, to keep him talking rather than mired in the sudden and uncharacteristic silence which seems to have taken him in its grip.

Sean glances up at him and wets his lips, Adam’s apple shifting the line of his throat. Charles feels something in him shuddering slightly, as if there are a thousand microscopic insects crawling up the insides of his veins.

But then they round the corner, and whatever words Sean had been swallowing become unnecessary.

Darwin is the attending, leading a team of three nurses, a medical student, and an emergency resident as they flit around the man in bed 14. Charles’s gaze, by habit, goes first to the screen poised above the patient’s head, monitoring his vitals. Someone has muted the alarm; the numbers flash red silently, now.

“BP is still dropping,” a nurse says, stethoscope pressed to the patient’s chest although her eyes stay trained on the vitals monitor. “70 over 40, and pulse is rising fast. ”

“Hang a five-percent dextrose and push 150 milligrams of amiodarone,” Darwin orders -- but he is already reaching for the crash cart. “We don’t want him back in v-tach. -- Dr. Xavier, good, you’re here. The patient is one of yours; family says you performed a heart transplant on him six months ago. Name is – “

“Ira Burns,” Charles says, his attention finally slipping down to the face of the man on the bed.

It would be disingenuous, to say he never forgets a patient’s face; he has seen too many of them for that to be feasible. Perhaps it would be better-spoken, to say that he never forgets the face of a patient like Ira Burns: former cocaine addict and bulimic, the black sheep of a Boston Brahmin family whose habits had quickly deteriorated his cardiac function until he ended up in Charles’s care, barely stable and – with his six months’ sobriety – barely eligible for transplantation.

Charles had never been quite comfortable with it, putting Ira Burns on the list. Six months’ sobriety was impressive out in the real world, but in the realm of cardiac transplant surgery it was often not enough. Charles had seen many patients come through his care who qualified to have the past excised from their bodies, a new life sewn into its place. Many of them succeeded, finishing their follow-up period and then vanishing, never to be heard from again. But there were those who ended up relapsing, as well; those who vanished for different reasons. This, Charles had feared, was the kind of patient Ira Burns would be.

He had hoped he was wrong, of course. He had hoped so much, that he’d given Ira Burns someone else’s heart: someone else’s second chance. A chance he thinks that everyone deserves. He refuses to regret it.

Even so…. Yes, there are reasons he knows this patient’s face.

“You remember him.” Darwin lifts his brows in Charles’s direction, the words more of a statement than an inquiry. “Was there anything special about the case? Any direction you can point us in to try to figure out how to stabilize this guy?”

Charles’s gaze darts back over to the patient. He looks like he did in surgery, skin blanched to the color of birch bark, lashes a stark smudge against his cheeks. The diaphoresis is new; sweat beads up along his temples and in the small hollow above his lips, shining greenish in the fluorescent light.

“He had a history of drug use and self-induced vomiting,” Charles says, his voice coming out thin in a way he does not think anyone but himself notices. “When we opened him up, his myocardium showed damage consistent with habitual ipecac consumption. He was six months sober; psychiatry cleared him for inclusion on the transplant list.”

Darwin nods. “We drew blood for a tox screen. It should be back in five or ten minutes.” He lets out a quiet, almost inaudible breath as he glances at the monitor again. “I already pushed two doses of Ativan. It brought his pulse down a little, but not enough.”

“Right,” Charles says, ignoring the way his throat wants to spasm around the word. If Darwin can get Ira Burns through the next fifteen minutes, then Charles can get him through the next forty-eight hours. And if Charles can just chase down the end of two days, he would feel comfortable saying that Ira Burns has a decent chance at survival.

So. One step at a time, then.

“I’ll see if I can clear something in my schedule, and I can get him into the OR sometime in the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours if nothing changes.”

His blood pressure is low, so Charles would place a good bet that this isn’t aortic dissection. But he can’t be positive. He leans across the end of the bed and takes Ira Burns’s wrists, fore- and middle fingers finding his radial pulses; they are equally weak on both sides.

“I don’t think it’s dissection,” Charles says.

“I’m sending him for a chest x-ray as soon as he’s stabilized,” Darwin says. “Got to be sure.”

“Of course. If it is, page me and I’ll try to get him in sooner rather than later. He has a good chance of surviving if we can treat it in the first twenty-four.” Charles will have to make some rather drastic shifts to the OR board. Mrs. Gruen will not be happy; this will be the third time he’s had to reschedule her procedure. “If not ….” He shrugs one shoulder. “We’ll see how things go from here.”

“Thanks,” Darwin says. “I know you’re busy, but – “

“Dr. Muñoz, he’s crashing!”

All focus snaps back to the man on the table. Charles is standing next to the crash chart – and though he has no reason to be here, has a surgery scheduled in an hour, he finds himself grasping the handles and pushing it toward the knot of nurses at the bedside.

“We’ve got v-fib,” one of them says as the medical student yanks what is left of the patient’s shirt out of the way, exposing his sallow chest and the quivering rise-fall of his ribcage.

Charles picks up the paddles and someone squirts a clear glob of jelly onto each of them. A quick dash of friction is enough to spread the lubricant evenly. The nurse handles the buttons, says: “Charging.”

“Clear,” Charles calls out. All hands are snatched away from the patient as Charles leans in to deliver the shock.

Ira Burns’s torso convulses faintly, his body shifting against the sheets as the electricity forcefully stops his heart, pushing the line on the monitors momentarily flat before green spikes thrust upward once again.

“Still v-fib. Another.”

“Charging.”

“Clear!”

After the third shock, 360 joules, the lines on the monitor stay flat after the electricity is delivered. The medical student fumbles at Ira Burns’s carotid as Charles passes the paddles off to a nurse and positions his clasped hands over the chest, falling into the rhythm of compressions. Someone else takes up the task of tilting back the head, sliding a laryngoscope down into the throat to intubate.

“One milligram epi,” Darwin demands.

The nurse who had been standing by for his order depresses the plunger on her syringe, pushing adrenaline into the IV line to bind to the adrenogenic receptors.

Alpha one receptors: increase vasoconstriction. Beta one: increase cardiac output. The adrenaline will also trigger glucagon secretion and inhibit insulin, thereby increasing adrenocorticotropic hormone production in the pituitary. Glycolysis will occur in the muscular tissue, glycogenolysis in the liver, lipolysis in the fat. All the ingredients for survival, everything needed to catalyze the cells into action.

Charles feels one of Ira Burns’s ribs crack beneath the force of his compressions. A moment later, a second rib goes as well.

Charles grits his teeth and keeps going, thinks about pushing the blood through the atria and ventricles of the heart, thinks about the physics of it: no two particles can possess the same space at the same time – and so the blood will flow, pulsing with the press of his hands, oxidating in the lungs as they inflate with air from the bag-valve-mask, keeping the brain alight with electricity.

He watches the monitor, because otherwise he will be watching Ira Burns’s face, and that is not where he will see the signs of life.

This is routine. Doctors in the Pit, surgeons in the operating theater – especially cardiac surgeons like Charles -- perform resuscitation multiple times a week.

They save patients, they lose patients. It is without melodrama. It is sad, it is routine; it is tragic, it is normal.

(He does not watch Ira Burns’s body, either. He does not need to see the scar from his own incision and sutures in its neat crevasse down the center of the sternum, skin wrinkling around the fibrosis, flesh shifting beneath his hands.)

He loses track of what the others are doing. He is aware in a vague sense of Darwin ordering more doses of epinephrine, and then atropine when that fails. He has little perception of time as it sinks past and down through the floor, their little room ticking forward with the hand of the clock and the steady up-down plunge of Charles’s hands.

“That’s enough,” Darwin says.

Another compression. Ira Burns’s mouth is hanging slack around the breathing tube, lips jostling slightly with every push of Charles’s hands.

“Dr. Xavier, it’s been fifteen minutes. He’s gone.”

Charles takes in a breath and blinks his eyes once, twice, three times. His arms lose their tension and he takes a final step back.

Ira Burns lies on the bed like any other corpse, his torso now oddly torqued on one side where Charles’s compressions fractured bone.

The nurse releases the respiration bag and Charles tastes sweat when he wets his lips. It’s over. They tried, they lost, and it’s over.

Darwin calls it.

“Time of death, 11:55 am.”

\--

3.

Charles cleans himself up, after. He splashes some cool water on his face, drags his fingers back through his hair, and flips his nametag right way ‘round on his scrubs. He is the attending surgeon; his residents do not need to see him looking like he just crawled his way out of internship year.

Mrs. Gruen will be pleased at least, he thinks as he makes his way back to the Heart Center and down to Operating Room 3. He will not have to reschedule her endovascular aneurysm repair after all. He takes a moment when he passes the OR board to write Raven’s name in the slot to be his assisting intern on placing that aortic stent. It will be his last surgery of the night, if there are no incoming traumas requiring emergency cardiac procedures. That is one of the downsides to specializing in cardiac: one is on call, even when not. There is no one else who can perform open heart surgery, no one else to prep a patient on the transplant list who just got the call that a heart is available, no one else salvage a dissecting aorta. It is the sort of responsibility that limitlessly fuels arrogance, even as it slowly chips away at everything else in one’s life.

Not that cardiothoracic surgery is the only specialty that can so skillfully unravel relationships and destroy families.

But is it the fault of the specialty, or of the physician?

Charles blinks his eyes four times in quick succession, trying to blot that thought from his mind before it develops any further. The heat of the water in the scrub room does the rest of the work to reorient him in the present moment, running out the faucet just this side of scalding. He startles slightly and jerks his hands out of the stream, readjusting by only the smallest degree before he reaches for the soap and tries again.

“Hey,” Alex says, nodding toward Charles as he starts to scrub in at the sink just next to him.

Charles smiles as he returns the greeting. He has always liked Alex; the man oversees the rest of the surgical nursing staff with a firm hand and stern diligence, and often makes sure tasks are completed before Charles is even aware he planned to request them. He has never been entirely sure that Alex shares the sentiment, but it makes no difference in the end. They function well together. That is far more important, Charles finds.

Alex lathers up to his elbows before looks up again and says: “So, did you read the email on the listserv? Apparently Dr. Erskine is retiring from the chiefship.”

 _That_ catches Charles’s attention; he glances up at Alex immediately, hands briefly faltering with the scrub brush. “What? How do you know?”

“He just sent it out an hour ago. Get this – he’s moving to _Beirut._ I’ve never even heard of the place.”

“It’s in Lebanon,” Charles offers. And, a moment later, “That’s … surprising. Last Christmas, he said he planned on working at least another ten years.” _You won’t get rid of me that easy, kid_ , had been his precise words. _I’m happier here than I would be on some golf course in South Carolina, believe you me_. And Charles _had_ believed him.

“Yeah, well, guess he changed his mind.” Alex finishes washing his hands and turns off the faucet with the foot pedal, both arms held upright in front of his torso for a junior nurse to pat down with a towel. “I mean, he’s got to be, what, eighty-five by now? Eighty-six? He’s more on the side of patient than doctor at this point.”

Charles frowns. “When is he leaving?”

“Two weeks. Can’t wait to get out of here it seems.”

Charles shuts off his own water and turns to face Alex more fully, meeting his gaze over the shoulder of the nurse who is draping the surgical gown about his shoulders, stretching his gloves down around his hands, the latex snapping against his forearms when she lets go. “Any word on who is coming in to replace him?’

Alex shakes his head. “It wasn’t in the letter. But I bet it’s that guy from New York Presbyterian; Scott says he’s been sniffing around this job for ages.”

Charles just nods. There is no demand to say anything more; they push into the operating theater backs-first, arms held out of range of contamination. The patient is already lying supine on the table, awake, his gaze seizing on Charles the moment he steps into the room.

“How long will it take?” the patient asks. “How long will I be out?”

“It varies,” Charles says as he steps to the bedside. He smiles down at the man, hoping to put him somewhat more at ease. “We have to make sure we get clean margins on the tumor. That can take time to do right, and we don’t want to open you back up again, do we?”

The patient returns his smile; it’s habit, of course, pure etiquette, to feel the urge to return the gesture when someone smiles at you – but it can be genuinely efficacious as well.

The heart rate on the vitals monitor drops by several points over the next few seconds, and Charles tugs his mask back up over his nose and mouth. “The tumor looks relatively small on your PET scan, so we should have you off this table in no time.”

Not that there is any such thing as ‘small’ for a cardiac rhabdomyosarcoma – but its removal should come easily.

“The anesthesiologist is going to put you under, now,” Charles says. His eyes flicker briefly up toward Marie and she gives him a faint nod, fingers poised above the controls of the anesthetic machine. Charles picks up the oxygen mask a beat later and settles it over the patient’s nose and mouth. “I want you to count down from ten for me, slowly. Can you do that?”

“Ten … nine … eight … se – _ven_ ... six.” His eyes flutter, glossy whites peeking out beneath the fringes of his lashes. “Fi….”

It is not as clear-cut as they make it look in the movies, the process of putting a patient under. On all the medical dramas, it’s a mere matter of pressing down on a plunger and a swift intubation. The directors skip past the tension that grips those first several seconds, just as the patient slips into the second stage of anesthesia, a stage characterized by convulsions and arrhythmia, vomiting and apnea. It is the anesthesiologist’s job to push them quickly through to the third stage when the patient is prepared for surgery, to keep the patient from dying on the table from the sedatives alone.

They also skip the way the patients’ eyes do not quite close under anesthesia, but remain in motion throughout the second phase before seizing still in the third. The patient simply _stares_ upward at his surgeons, pupils fixed and dilated like a dead man’s, watching wide and spectral. This is why the nurses tear off pieces of tape to press over patients’ eyelids, to keep their empty gazes from the surgeons’ sight.

It never starts to feel routine. One would think it would, after so many years – cutting into someone’s chest and cracking apart their ribs and holding their heart in your hand. Other jobs do. They say even the most exhilarating careers can grow stale over time, passion drying up into dust on the wind. It is not that surgeons are exempt from this; Charles sees them every day in the halls, men and women who no longer see their jobs as important and their patients as living breathing beating beings. Just the daily grind and a curio stretched out pale and naked on the table.

But Charles’s pulse still skips when he presses the blade of his scalpel to human flesh. He still thinks of birds fluttering wings against cages every time he opens someone up and watches their heart throbbing behind their ribs.

This man’s heart does not throb, however. It _slogs_ along, atria heaving as they flush with blood, clogged beneath the weight of the persimmon-sized tumor that clings to the myocardium. Charles’s lips tighten briefly.

“All right,” he says. “Let’s get him on bypass.” He holds out his hand. “Scalpel.”

Once bypass has been instituted and the heart temporarily stopped, Charles opens up the left atrium. A nurse manipulates the suction tube, evacuating enough blood that Charles can lean forward a few inches more to visualize the growth. Alex is retracting the tumor to allow Charles to see how it is developing out of the myocardium; the plum-colored meat of the heart sinks rapidly into a darker hue as it becomes the mottled brown mass which will slowly kill the patient over the next several months.

Sickness is often invisible to the naked eye. Who can look at an ill man and _see_ the virus as it injects its seed into a healthy cell? Who can _see_ the bacteria as they crawl along within someone’s gut? Even cardiac disease, even with the chest split open and the heart exposed, can be difficult to detect to the untrained observer.

So Charles is delicate in the way he begins to snip away at the tumor, even as he cuts the majority of its mass away from the interior wall of the heart. Three-quarters of the growth falls wet and limp into the palm of Charles’s waiting hand and he drops it into the jar of saline as soon as possible. The easy part is over.

“Cancer of the heart,” Alex mutters, withdrawing his tweezers. “Is it even worth getting the surgery? He’s going to die no matter what we do.”

“It will buy him some time, to spend with his friends and family,” Charles says. “It will make him more comfortable. It’s not a permanent solution, but it’s not useless, either.” He slices off another tiny bit of tumor. Open heart surgery is not without its risks, but many patients find the potential benefits outweigh the dangers.

Alex shrugs one shoulder. “I’d just want to be done with it, if it were me,” he says. “VDD. Voluntary death by dehydration. I had a patient go for that once; it seems peaceful.”

Charles shoots Alex a quick, warning look. Passive euthanasia is legal in the United States, but that does not make it any less of a controversial topic, especially in a room full of doctors who have all had their fair share of malpractice near-misses. Alex clams up.

“We’re going to have to do a transverse aortotomy,” Charles says. “I can’t see where the tumor is attached from here. Get me one – no, two – porcine atria and a valve; we may have to do a replacement if we can’t just shave the tumor off. Alex, clamp.”

Alex obeys, cutting off circulation at the aortic arch. A nurse takes Charles’s scalpel and hands him steel scissors instead. Charles poises the blades at the vessel, the metal just barely touching flesh. If he hesitates, it is only for a moment – and then he is tensing his fingers enough to snip the artery in a single clean stroke. Releasing the scissors, the aorta blooms open at a one-inch slit. Another slice, and the aorta is entirely visualized. Charles can see the axial side of the left atrium – and, yes, there it is, the base of the tumor creeping in gossamer-thin threads across the aortic valve.

In total, the resection of the tumor takes ten hours. Charles’s head is aching by the time he’s stripping off his surgical gown in the scrub room. The patient will be awake and lucid in a couple of hours -- and Charles will be on his feet between now and then, putting in that aortic stent. He wonders, vaguely, when the notion of spending thirteen hours straight on his feet stopped seeming so abhorrent. 

The scrub room door swings open. Charles glances back, expecting to see a member of whatever team is using this OR next. But it is Dr. Abraham Erskine instead, his scrub cap tucked into his coat pocket.

“Dr. Xavier,” Erskine says. “Do you have a moment?”

Charles’s brows lift by the faintest of margins. “Of course, Chief. Just let me finish cleaning up, and I’ll meet you in your office in ten minutes.”

Erskine shakes his head. “No, that won’t be necessary; this won’t take long.”

He pauses, and Charles realizes after a moment that Erskine is expecting some kind of response. “All right,” Charles says, tossing his soiled gown into the laundry basket and tucking his hands into his pockets. “Go ahead.”

Erskine takes a small step toward him. “I just got back from speaking with one of your patients’ families,” he says. “Ira Burns; he died in the ED this morning.”

Charles nods. “I was there. If you want me to meet with them, I can –“

“No,” Erskine says, so sharply that it catches Charles off guard. “No, I wouldn’t do that if I were you. They’re causing a bit of a fuss. Apparently when Darwin was giving them the news, he mentioned that the cause of death was likely heart failure, secondary to a relapse in the patient’s drug addiction or his eating disorder. The family wasn’t too happy about that. Theyclaimed their darling boy wasn’t like that anymore, that he’d changed – standard denial, you know the story.” Erskine shrugs, the gesture oddly youthful on his aged frame. “Anyway, they’re demanding an autopsy, and the law says we have to give it to them.”

“I didn’t kill him,” Charles says, nearly cutting Erskine off. “The transplant went without complication.”

Erskine looks, briefly, surprised – but his expression reverts back to neutral quickly enough. Charles fights the color threatening to rise in his cheeks; he doubts the chief of surgery has ever been interrupted by a junior attending before.

“Of course,” Erskine says, almost kindly. “I’m sure you don’t have anything to worry about. But the tox screen _did_ come back negative, so anything on the autopsy that might show evidence of some kind of recent … destructive behavior … could only help our case.” He reaches out, claps Charles once on the shoulder, and smiles. “Don’t worry so much, kid,” he says, his voice gone a bit softer. “It happens to all of us at some point. You know, I think I had my first autopsy request around your age, myself. It’ll be fine.”

Charles fights the urge to swallow, and settles for nodding again, instead.

Erskine steps away after a few seconds, toward the door. “I’ll just need you to send your records from the transplant surgery down to pathology. There’s a thirty-day limit on autopsy reports. This will be over before you know it. In the meantime, just focus on your active cases -- and let us take care of the rest.”

“Yes,” Charles says, pressing his lips up into what he hopes is a steady smile. “Thank you, Dr. Erskine. I’ll do that as soon as possible.”

“Good boy,” Erskine says. He hesitates for a moment at the door, as if he wishes to say something further – but then he is gone, leaving Charles alone in the scrub room and trying not to throw up.

He did not kill Ira Burns. He knows this, he _knows_ it for a fact, as securely as he knows the back of his hand and the names of the twelve cranial nerves. It is true, that the transplant went without complication.

But it did not go without error.

\--

4.

The thing is, it was not even a significant error.

A small slip of his scalpel when he was accessing the aorta and preparing the heart to go on bypass. The damage had seemed minimal; no one else even noticed the small tear in the arterial wall. It did not break all the way through; it had been completely superficial. Charles simply added two quick sutures there while he was stitching in the donor heart, sutures that were not even visible along the seam between old and new. Charles’s sutures were perfect. He never missed a stitch; he had been sewing people up since his second year of medical school, after all. He sutured aortas every _day_ , and they had not failed yet.

But that did not erase the moment when he felt tissue give beneath his scalpel when there should have been none. The reeling rush of adrenaline when he saw the tear in that white flesh.

He knows that Ira Burns’s death was not his fault.

There is no reason to be concerned about this autopsy.

Ira Burns died from cocaine use, or a relapse in his bulimia, or both.

There is no reason to be concerned.

\--

5.

After all his scheduled surgeries are finished, Charles drops by his office. He pulls up Ira Burns’s chart last and rereads every lab test, every rounds note and every single word from his surgical report with excruciating focus. He had mentioned more than once in the chart his suspicion that Ira Burns was not adequately prepared to remain permanently sober. However, the psychiatrist’s report was attached in an appendix, and its conclusion declared Ira Burns fit for transplantation.

Charles had not mentioned that slip of his scalpel in the surgical report. It had not seemed relevant at the time. Charles was not sure why, exactly, he failed to comment on the mistake when he was actually _in_ the OR with his still hands in the patient’s chest. It had seemed so small, so minor, so … _not_ -dangerous, that Charles had just … stayed silent. And when he considered that perhaps he ought to at least make note of it, enough time had passed that to mention it so belatedly would have seemed strange and even suspicious. There had been no reason for suspicion, so Charles decided not to raise any.

He could revise the report now, of course. He could input a note about the error. But it would be time-stamped, obviously added at the very last moment. With a cut that small, no pathologist on earth would notice it in autopsy. There are plenty of stitches along Burns’s aorta; the extra sutures will be scarcely visible next to those from the transplant itself. However, mentioning it explicitly could be fatal for Charles’s career. Not only would the patient’s family and their attorneys leap onto that confession as if it was a veritable proof of Charles’s liability, but the delay in his notation of it (and that he did not bring it up with his team at the time of the surgery) would make it too easy to paint him as negligent. Charles would face a malpractice suit from one of the wealthiest families in Boston, a suit he could not hope to win. With that kind of press, his career would be over before it had even begun.

No, then. He will not add a note. He will not play the part of the incompetent surgeon when he has done nothing to lead to this man’s death.

Charles closes out the chart and forwards it to the head of the pathology department before shutting down his computer. He packs the latest volumes of _Lancet_ and _The New England Journal of Medicine_ away into his bag and pulls on his jacket, leaving his white coat hanging on the hook on the back of his office door.

He is in the parking garage, halfway to his car, when his phone buzzes with an alert for a new e-mail. It is the confirmation of the pathology department’s receipt of Ira Burns’s chart. Charles scrolls down through the report, more skimming than reading, until his eyes catch on something that makes him halt in his step.

He stands there, in the middle of the dark garage, for what could as easily have been a few seconds as it could have been ten minutes. The light directly overhead is flickering, about to burn out; it casts a scant amber glow over the empty lanes and the cars sitting darkened in their spaces.

Of course.

Of _course_.

Naturally, Charles would have his case’s autopsy assigned to the one man who seemed to have made it his business to get as many doctors sued and fired as he possibly could. The _one_ pathologist who might – **might** – actually be perversely perfectionistic enough in his investigation to discover that centimeter-long slit in Ira Burns’s aorta.

Incidentally, the same pathologist that Charles had lived with for ten months before their less-than-mutual separation last year.

Charles closes his eyes, squeezes them shut, and tells himself he must have misread the e-mail. There are ninety-six attending pathologists employed by Massachusetts General Hospital, fifty-two residents, and eighteen Fellows. Of these, thirteen faculty as well as all of the residents perform autopsy service in addition to their other responsibilities. The probability of this assignment is 1.5%.

But when he looks back to his phone, the text remains the same.

_Presiding Pathologist: Erik Lehnsherr, M.D._

\--


	3. Chapter 3

PART TWO

“Though they go mad they shall be sane,

Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;

Though lovers be lost love shall not;

And death shall have no dominion.”

-Dylan Thomas

\--

1.

“You ever planning on going home, Lehnsherr?”

Erik glances up from where he has been frowning at the lens of his microscope. Azazel stands in the doorway, scarf already draped around his neck and his coat slung over his shoulder, one foot in the hall. “I’m backed up,” he says. “It will be a while.”

“Maybe if you spend less time on autopsy, you are not so backed up in future,” Azazel suggests with an arched brow.

“You’re here nearly as often as I am,” Erik points out.

Azazel just shrugs. “And now I am going home. You are not.” (Though, Erik notes, Azazel never seems to mention just what it is he is so eager to go home _to._ Late night television hardly seems worth it.)

Erik turns his gaze back to the microscope, adjusting the fine focus by a single degree. “Good night, Azazel.”

Erik can practically hear Azazel rolling his eyes before he finally exits, the steel door swinging shut in his wake. He is grateful for the silence that Azazel leaves behind. During the day hours, the laboratory is too often packed with faculty and Fellows and residents – and the odd medical student or two – bustling around with their boxes of slides, and slicing tissue samples on any sterile flat surface, dropping their paperwork all over the floor. Erik likes the morgue for its cold, somber quiet, and he likes the autopsy room for its antiseptic efficiency. He likes working at night because he is the only one here.

Azazel is right, of course. Erik has something of a habit of taking his time with his autopsies, making use of the full thirty days allotted to examine a cadaver in all its detail before writing up his final report. He knows too well, how doctors will try to get away with gross acts of negligence by taking advantage of pathologists’ tight schedules and tighter bonds of loyalty. And this knowledge is reinforced every g-ddamn time that he catches another surgeon’s bloody handprints all over the cause of death – half-heartedly concealed, of course, in an apathetic gesture at remorse. _Almost as if_ , Erik had said in one such surgeon’s disciplinary hearing, _he **wanted** to be caught. _

He peels off his gloves and pushes the microscope away, drawing his keyboard down in its place. Waking the computer from sleep, he pulls up the web-based medical records software to enter the information about the red blood cells he had been counting.

There are jokes people make, that the only people who go into a pathology residency are geniuses and antisocial types, people either too disinterested or too unskilled with social interaction to trust themselves near any patient who is still alive. In Erik’s experience, he too often wonders if maybe pathologists should be the _only_ people trusted near living patients; clinical physicians certainly manage to fuck everything up nicely on their own despite such prodigious social skills. The best Erik and his colleagues can do is to make their lab reports as clear as is functionally possible. Erik has gotten in the habit of including highly detailed descriptions of the pathological findings in his reports rather than the simple one-paragraph responses most people manage. The more specific he can be, the better the chance that those _reading_ his reports will be able to interpret them.

Even if sometimes it can feel like spoon-feeding mashed bananas to a baby.

His phone rings. Erik glances at the caller ID before answering; it’s Emma Frost. “I’m working, Emma,” he says, cradling the phone against his shoulder as he leans back in to the microscope, counting the neutrophils with tally marks on a blank sticky note.

“I know,” Emma says, her voice cool and clipped as ever. “That’s why I called. Have you finished those tests I ordered? Patrick said they came back abnormal, so the lab referred them to you.”

“I don’t know. Which patient?”

“R. Howell. Standard battery. There should also be a resected brain mass that was sent down earlier.”

Erik steals a quick glance toward his computer screen. “I’m doing the peripheral blood smear right now. Why, is it urgent?”

“Maybe. What have you found out?”

Erik only just resists the urge to roll his eyes. “I just told you, I’m doing the count _right now_. I don’t have any results yet. Call me back in an hour.”

For a moment, there is silence on the other end of the line. And then: “I’m coming down there.”

Erik releases a sharp, exasperated sigh. “What for? To sit in an uncomfortable chair while I stare at slides for the next sixty minutes? Surely you have better things to do.”

“My shift ended ten minutes ago, sugar. And I want those results as soon as you’re done with them; I don’t want to have to sit and wait for the server to upload them properly.”

Erik wants to ask why Emma is reading test results when her shift is over, but he doubts he will get any kind of satisfactory response. So he just says: “It’s your time,” and hangs up the phone.

Emma takes fifteen minutes to wind her way down to the pathology department, giving Erik enough time to finish the blood smear and attach his report to the results found by the lab technicians. By the time she arrives he is sitting on the stool by the exam table, measuring the resected mass with the lab’s ancient ruler (slightly bloodstained, despite all the effort they put into keeping it sanitized).

“The results?” she asks immediately.

“On the computer.”

He sees her walk over to his station out of the corner of his eye, reaching for his mouse to scroll through his report. He marks down the length of the mass on his clipboard and jot down a few quick macroscopic observations of the specimen.

Emma straightens up across the room. “You write your reports in  code? ”

“Synoptic format,” Erik corrects, still writing. “XML. It lets me both effectively organize and annotate the findings. And the formatting works better with the system than free text.”

“I see. And is there a reason that you redid the tests, instead of just interpreting the techs’ results?”

“If you want something done right, do it yourself,” Erik murmurs. “Isn’t that how the saying goes?”

She does not answer. Erik reaches for his slide case, collecting a slide and cover slip. He flash freezes the specimen in the cryostat, the machine automatically transferring the now rock-hard sample to the microtome, which slices off four paper-thin slivers of the mass. Erik carefully transfers them onto separate slides between the tongs of a pair of tweezers. He doubts Emma came all the way down to the basement just to wait for him to finish running this examination. She does not care about any patient enough for that. But Erik is content to let her stand there, arms crossed, watching him until she gets tired of dragging out the suspense and simply tells him whatever it is she came here to say.

Erik carries the slides and their samples back across the room to his station, typing a quick placeholder into his report as a reminder to go back and transcribe his clipboard notes from the gross exam. He reaches for his box of dyes and shuffles vials around until he finds the H & E stain, applying a few drops to the first specimen.

“Dr. Erskine is leaving,” Emma says at last, her patience clearly breaking. “Retiring to the Middle East, apparently.”

“I know,” Erik says, replacing the blood smear on his microscope with the histologic section. “I got the email, same as everyone else.”

“Oh, good. And I suppose you also know who is coming in to replace him, then.”

Erik tilts his head forward to gaze into the lens, fiddling with the focus as he says, “Surgery is not my department, Emma. But whoever it is, I am certain you will have a grand time toadying up to him. Let me know how that goes.”

He can hear the click of Emma’s heels against the floor as she approaches his desk. Erik has no idea how she manages to wear three-inch heels to work every day as chief resident; she is on her feet for twenty-four hour shifts. Sometimes longer, if there is a high volume of emergency surgeries. Of course, he supposes they make her take them off for the actual surgery – though the image of Emma pulling a pair of disposable shoe covers over those Jimmy Choos is an entertaining one.

“Erik,” she says.

“What?”

Silence. Erik finds it impossible to concentrate on the sample with her lurking over his shoulder like that, close enough that he can smell her expensive _soliflore_ perfume. He leans back from the microscope after one last frustrated second, twisting in his chair to look at Emma and raising one brow.

Emma’s lips go slightly thin and she shakes her head once, but only just. “The new chief surgeon,” she begins – and, inexplicably, Erik feels as if the bottom has dropped out of his stomach, the dark tendrils of something like dread curling around the edges of his mind.

A moment later, Emma speaks again and he learns why.

“It’s Shaw.”

\--

2.

It is probably the only thing Emma could have said that would have distracted Erik from his work at the microscope. Emma ends up stealing Azazel’s chair, sitting facing him with her legs crossed neatly at the knees. Erik has stripped off his gloves and tossed them into the wastebasket, leaving his hand free to drag his fingers back through his hair, settling any strands that had come loose during his work.

The moment Emma told him that Shaw would be coming to the hospital to take Erskine’s place as chief of surgery, Erik had somehow managed to maintain the prescience not to simply … _react_. Even now, his heart is still pounding too hard and too fast; he feels as if he is only just holding himself in check. He had been able to snag the fringes of his anger before they could explode outward, reeling them in and grasping them close to his chest. Thankfully, all that was visible in his expression was a mild irritation as he told her he could not care less if the new head of surgery was Dr. Oz; it was still not his department.

“That doesn’t mean you don’t care. More than anyone else in this hospital, I should think.”

Erik had reacted rather poorly. Few people know precisely why Erik Lehnsherr left his tenure-track position at New York Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia Med to start all over again in Boston, and of Sebastian Shaw’s role in that transition. He had not been aware that Emma was among them.

“How did you even find out about this?” Erik is saying now, glaring at her as if he can extract the answer from the way she narrows her eyes alone.

“Azazel told me,” she says. “Last year, when he and I were together, right after Xavier – “

“Left me,” Erik finishes for her, his voice gone flat. “Yes. I see.”

Emma gives him a faintly disapproving look, likely, he suspects, to scold him for interrupting her. “Dr. Erskine told me this afternoon, since I will be working directly under Shaw’s supervision as chief resident. I thought you might want to know, in case you’re planning on packing up and moving halfway across the country again to escape him.”

“I’m not _leaving_.”

“Of course not, sugar.”

“I’m not.” He spins around in his chair, reaching for a fresh pair of gloves to yank onto his hands. He leans back over his microscope and stares at the cells on their slide. He hears Emma sighing behind him and the soft rustling sound as she uncrosses and then re-crosses her legs.

“Do you really think you will be able to handle being around him?” Emma says. “From what I understand, he all but caused you to have a nervous breakdown. I doubt you need to be exposed to that again.”

“Don’t tell me what I do and do not _need_ , Emma,” Erik all but snaps. “Histologic section A displays diffuse cortical parenchyma infiltration by monomorphous slender bipolar tumor cells and both radial and longitudinal perivascular ensheathment.”

“English, Erik, please. And you know I just want what is best for this hospital.”

Erik twists around to face her again, his mouth setting into a tight frown and his eyes gone just a little bit too bright. “Did I not do my job? Did I not perform my duties not only per standard, but to the point of _excellence?_ “

“You did -- and it is why everyone here loathes you, you know.”

“Because I do not let them get away with _negligent homicide_. You will excuse me if I do not waste my pity.” He rips off his gloves and starts typing up his report on the first specimen. “I am not interested in discussing Shaw with you. As you can see, I have work to do. _Your_ work, in fact, so if you want it done well I suggest you leave me to it.”

For a moment, he almost expects her to protest – but then there is the sound of Azazel’s chair rolling back across the floor as she stands, and the tap of her heels moving toward the door.

“Does Dr. Erskine know?”

Erik’s fingers do not falter on the vial of cresyl violet; the new specimen stains perfectly. “It’s over. It is in the past. I think we should leave it there.”

There is silence, and for a few seconds Erik thinks she has left. And then she speaks again, her last words: “I’ll believe that when I see it.”

The door closes behind her. Erik’s breath feels strangled in his chest. He sets the slide down on his desk before he can lose control and hurl it against the wall.

\--

3.

Erik finishes the analysis of Emma’s specimen and uploads the results as well as the interpretation and diagnosis to the server, flagging it for Emma’s attention (angiocentric glioma – a rare type of brain cancer which Erik has not seen since his residency days). She will be pleased; the tumor was resected with clean margins. She will not have to assist on another ten-hour brain surgery.

Two more autopsy orders have come in for him in the past few hours, both from the emergency department. Erik downloads the charts onto his tablet and prints out the cover sheets, stacking them in his inbox. The rest of his backlog can wait until tomorrow morning. Everything urgent has been finished, and Erik is starting to feel strangely constricted in the empty laboratory. He needs to sleep.

Erik takes work home with him, a few sheets of handwritten notes that need to be typed up, and his dictation, which needs to be transformed into a coherent report. (Not to mention, a voice in the back of his head reminds him, he still needs to finish the revisions on that paper for _Acta Neuropathologica_. Publish or perish, and so on.) He catches the T at the Charles/MGH station, standing in the dark with the wind catching his scarf and whipping it past his shoulder, the air crisp and bone-cold as it skates up off the surface of the river.

It is not far to his stop from here; in fact, he probably could have walked it, but it is the last train of the night and he likes the T like this, with its flickering fluorescent lights and the darkness of the tunnels when they speed back underground, all the seats empty except for his own. He knows what a more imaginative man might say – something about the train to the end of the world, something about the sweetness of solitude. Erik is not, in the end, a very imaginative man.

Erik lives equidistant from Kendall and Central Square; he gets off at Kendall to avoid the throngs of drunk MIT and Harvard students who would no doubt still be swarming Central this time of night. Kendall, on the other hand, is nearly empty. Erik has always gotten the sense that Kendall Square is constantly under development – as if he is always waiting for it to expand, to swell out into something lively and thriving. But it never quite manages it, never quite surpasses its maximum capacity of a few early-closing coffee shops and restaurants.

Erik walks with his collar turned up against the wind, headphones plugged in and his hands tucked into the warmth of his coat pockets. Shaw is not in this city yet. The air is still clean, unpolluted by that man’s presence. Erik wonders if Shaw has been here before, for an interview or a conference. He feels as if he ought to be able to taste Shaw’s scent with every breath if that were true. As if Shaw would leave a dark trail through these streets in his wake, one that Erik would feel in the asphalt beneath his feet, a sticky residue that would cling to Erik’s every sense.

Emma is right. Erik cannot work in Shaw’s presence knowing that Shaw is one floor up, slicing open trauma patients in the emergency department operating rooms. He cannot have another of Shaw’s corpses on his autopsy table, cannot make another incision into dead flesh and dread what he will find.

But neither can he do anything else. He refuses to turn his back and flee. It is clearly what Emma expects of him – though Shaw, he thinks, knows better. Erik cannot quite suppress the suspicion that Shaw tracked him here on purpose. Doubtless, holding an estranged control over Erik’s life and career no longer satisfies … and it will never be enough. When Shaw grows tired of abusing his new position, he will move on to something new, something _more_ stimulating.

Erik is distracted enough that he actually walks past his apartment and has to turn back, once he realizes he has reached the next corner. His apartment is dark and every bit as cold as the outside air when Erik steps inside. He hangs his scarf on the coat rack and twists the knob on the radiator until it finally shudders into life, spitting a stream of hot water against the wall behind. He sets the coffee pot to brew in the kitchen, and once he has a fresh cup of dark roast in his hand he retreats back to the spare bedroom. A few months after Charles moved in, Erik had transformed it into a makeshift study of sorts, walls lined with bookshelves and file cabinets, his desk stacked high with the latest editions of the best pathology journals.

Erik piles his latest notes onto an empty spot on his desk and ignores them, instead pulling up Google on his desk computer. He types “Sebastian Shaw” into the search field; it brings him everything from Shaw’s profile on the New York Presbyterian Hospital site to his LinkedIn account, and ten pages of articles about his various successes in the field of acute and trauma surgery.

There is nothing about his impending transfer to Massachusetts General Hospital, even when Erik changes the search terms. The decision must be recent enough that it has not yet been officially announced. Nor, Erik notices, is there anything about the scandal from four years back, and the subsequent investigation. Either Shaw had done a magnificent job of keeping it out of the press, or he had simply managed to have it erased from journalism’s collective memory after the acquittal. (Journalism – medicine – the world. Pick a history, and Shaw’s crimes had been removed. Excised.)

Erik takes a sip of his coffee; he let it sit too long, it has gone lukewarm. He clicks on a link at random and it pulls up an article from _The New York Times_ , dated eight years ago.

“Sebastian R. Shaw, one of the top critical care and trauma surgeons in America, was today appointed Surgeon-in-Chief at New York Presbyterian Hospital and Chair of Surgery at the affiliated Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. Dr. Shaw, who was named Columbia University’s prestigious Edward W. Juilliard Professor of Surgery in 2001, has been at the forefront of cutting-edge surgical care at New York Presbyterian for the past eleven years.”

Erik scrolls down two paragraphs.

“’Dr. Shaw is a truly outstanding surgeon,’ says Dr. Mark Hollis, former Surgeon-in-Chief and Shaw’s predecessor. ‘He has been a leader in bringing new technological advancements to surgery at New York Presbyterian, and has produced a truly outstanding collection of groundbreaking surgical research during his tenure here. Moreover, I have never met a man more dedicated to the well-being of his patients, or to his medical integrity. I am pleased to pass the reins along to Dr. Shaw, and firmly believe that he shall lead New York Presbyterian forward into a new era of medicine.’”

Erik hits backspace without reading any further. The other articles on the page are all the same; they report on Shaw having received some prestigious award, or list him as one of the top surgeons in the nation. It is nauseating.

Dr. Erskine is leaving in two weeks. It strikes Erik as … abrupt. And not nearly enough time to prepare for Shaw’s presence at the hospital.

He drags his hand back through his hair again and reaches for the first set of notes in his stack. He needs to get his mind off this, at least long enough to do his work. He will undoubtedly have plenty of time to ruminate further on Shaw’s impending arrival tonight -- when he is trying, and failing, to fall asleep.

\--

4.

Erik was eight, the first time he can remember his mother overdosing.

He did not understand what was happening, at first. She was curled up on the floor with her knees drawn to her chest, lips blanched bluish. He could not tell if she was still breathing until he was already down there on the floor with her, both arms flung across her torso, shaking her – but even those breaths came shallow and rough, each inhalation a quiet rattle in the back of her throat.

Erik called 1-1-2 because he could not remember how to do CPR.

When the medics got there, one of them drew away from the group huddled around his mother to press a large hand to Erik’s shoulder and say: “Where’s your dad, kid? We might want to give him a call.”

“He’s dead,” Erik said. “Is she going to live?”

“We’re going to take good care of her, all right?”

That was the only answer he got. They took his mother away, then, and Erik rode in the back of the police car to the downtown station, where a woman in a brown vest gave him a lollipop and asked if he wanted to watch _Die fliegende Ferdinand_ on the TV.

The show was about a boy who visited a planet of flowers. He brought the seeds of those flowers back with him to Earth, where they had the power to cure diseases and solve world hunger.

It was stupid, and Erik had always hated it. He watched it anyway, and by the time he had watched every episode the precinct had on tape, he hated it even more.

Eventually a woman who said she was from social services came. She took him to the hospital to see his mother.

Edie Lehnsherr was awake, if barely. She stroked Erik’s hair with one frail hand and promised him she would never leave him, that everything was going to be all right. He pulled himself up onto the bed and lay down next to her, head pillowed on her shoulder, and refused to leave four hours. They had to wait until he fell asleep, and then carry him away.

She went into rehab for two months after that. Erik stayed with his grandmother in Düsseldorf. Then Edie was back – and then she was gone again a year later, for three more months.

Erik got used to it. He never really unpacked his suitcase, after a certain point. He kept a few necessities stuffed in the bottom: a toothbrush, a few books, several pairs of socks, a winter coat. At least he knew his grandmother liked it when he was there, even if she didn’t like why.

The second time his mother overdosed, Erik wasn’t there. He was at school, and she passed out in the middle of the sidewalk downtown and they took her to the hospital in an ambulance. A man in an ugly suit came and searched their home and asked Erik a lot of questions about school, and what they ate, and whether or not they’d ever lost power, and what happened if Erik did something bad and got in trouble.

They sent him off to live with his grandmother again, for a year this time. His mother was older when he returned, her skin yellowed and sagging in all the wrong places, her fingers narrow as bones when she sank them into his hair, pulled him forward to kiss his brow.

When Erik thinks back on his childhood, it feels as if he lived two different lives:

The one in which his mother is alive, and healthy, and loves him with the full fierceness of her being …

… and the one where she withers away curled up in the center of her bed, hands twitching around a needle – where she does not recognize his face, and barely remembers that she loves him at all.

He never forgets, though. He remembers that she loved him. And more than that, he knows that he loved her. It’s enough.

\--

5.

Erik sends the diener and resident away after the abdominal cavity’s contents have been removed from the cadaver, weighed and sampled and stored away in jars.

The residents would never learn anything if Erik forced them to assist on the full examination of the body. Typical autopsies take a few hours, but for Erik they can last for days, and even weeks, as he analyzes the tissues and every available surface of every organ. Until all possibilities have been examined, he will not declare cause of death. As much as Erik thinks every would-be autopsist should conduct themselves in this way, he is practical enough to know his method is unlikely to become the standard. Performing autopsies accounts for less than ten percent of an attending pathologist’s workload; to spend days on a cadaver means spending that much more time on everything else, as well. People want to go home. People want to have lives, and families. Neither life nor family flourishes in the company of the dead.

He has just sliced through the thin sac enclosing the brain when the door to the autopsy room swings open. “I told you,” Erik says, guiding the blade of his scalpel along the circumference of the dura mater, “I don’t need you for this. Azazel will be wanting someone to do counts in the lab. Go.”

“I’m afraid I haven’t the faintest idea how to do a count,” a too-familiar voice says.

Erik would recognize that accent anywhere. He looks up.

Charles Xavier is smiling at him from the doorway, his hands clasped behind his back, that boyish face coupled with the new scrubs, green stethoscope, and pressed white coat making him look as if he has just stepped out of a medical school brochure.

G-d, but even the way Charles wears his coat: completely unbuttoned, a small timer clipped to the front pocket, his nametag hanging from his scrub waist rather than his lapel. Erik has seen that coat lying wrinkled on his bedroom floor, he has watched Charles pulling it on in the morning, has taken it to the dry cleaners and hung it up in the closet next to the neat row of Charles’s trousers. He knows that coat like the back of his own hand.

His own hand, which is trembling. Even with the scalpel in it.

 _Be still_. Erik turns his gaze back down toward the skull.

“Dr. Xavier,” Erik says, trading the scalpel for a pair of tweezers. He grasps the corner of the dura, peeling it slowly back from the organ it protects. “Is there something I can do for you?”

“It’s been a while,” Charles says, shamelessly ignoring Erik’s question as he meanders over toward the autopsy table. Erik sees his gaze slip toward the cadaver’s face, which has been tugged down and folded over, the crumpled nose the only visible feature. Charles flinches, and looks away. He picks up the chart at the foot of the table instead, flipping open the binder cover to the first page before snapping it closed and setting it down again. “How are you doing?”

“ _Marvelously_ ,” Erik says through gritted teeth. “I am surprised you’re not in surgery.” He draws the voice recorder toward himself and speaks a few words into the microphone about the appearance of the leptomeninges. Surely, he thinks, Charles has somewhere else to _be_. Cardiac surgeons work the longest hours, and the worst ones. Charles used to have to spend his call hours in the hospital; there were enough midnight emergencies to keep him from sleeping at home.

“Lunch break,” Charles supplies. He pulls over one of the unoccupied stools and perches himself next to Erik by the head of the cadaver. “I’m on a diet. I came down here in an attempt to lose my appetite.”

Erik shoots Charles a glance – Charles smiles, in that vague way of his – and Erik turns his gaze away again quickly.

Charles taps his fingers on the edge of the autopsy table a few inches to Erik’s left, rather pointedly avoiding looking down into the cadaver’s skull cavity. Erik does not like Charles sitting this close to him. He can smell – well, vastly, he can smell the disinfecting soap that the surgeons scrub in with -- but beneath that he can smell the crisp notes of Charles’s laundry detergent, and he likes to imagine he can smell the citrus-y tang of that shampoo Charles used while they were still living together. The last, he suspects exists only in his mind.

“Have you been busy?” Charles asks. He is looking at Erik as if he thinks he can skim back the layers of Erik’s mind through willpower alone and stitch himself into Erik’s thoughts. It is unsettling – and so Erik keeps his attention focused on the cadaver as he reaches gloved hands down into the socket of the skull to start trimming the cranial nerves, freeing the brain one mooring at a time.

“Busier than you, clearly.”

Erik pulls the brain upward _en masse_ to reach the spinal cord. A neat clip of his scissors cuts that final connection and he lifts the organ from its body, cradled between the pads of all ten fingers.

“Then why _did_ you send your assistants away?” Charles asks half a beat later. “Wouldn’t it be a lot quicker, to have someone helping you?”

“They had better things to be doing than finishing up an autopsy,” Erik says, spinning his stool around to face the smaller examination table. “And this case is suspected Alzheimer’s disease. I am a neuropathologist. They are not.”

“I see,” Charles says, in that tone of voice that always makes Erik think that no, he does not, in fact, _see_.

Erik sets the brain onto the scale and flips his face shield up before he reaches back for the silver voice recorder again, dragging it closer toward himself along its track in the ceiling. “The brain weighs 1289 grams. Excised, it appears normal in all usual respects. --You barely speak to me for thirteen months, and then you show up to sit around and watch me perform an autopsy? What do you _want_ , Charles?”

Because it strikes him as rather disingenuous – cowardly, in its way -- for Charles to cut him off so entirely and then, for all appearances, simply _take it back_ and revert to acting as if nothing had ever happened between them … as if they were still two young attendings flirting during their off hours. Erik refuses to play Charles’s game, whatever it is (and make no mistake, he is certain that Charles has one, despite all of Charles’s efforts at mild smiles and innocent eyes).

At least Charles has the decency to look faintly abashed by the time Erik turns his gaze toward him again. He clasps his hands in his lap, twisting his fingers and sitting in silence for a few seconds before he says, “You’re right.” And then: “I’m sorry. It has not been my intent to avoid you, for what it’s worth.” The very tips of his index fingers have started to flush pink by the time Charles untangles his hands, wiping the palms along the thighs of his trousers. “I can leave you be. I apologize for disturbing you.”

“You don’t have to go.” Erik speaks, and wishes he could take it back as soon as the words have fallen from his lips. He is not one for pining after long-lost lovers. He does not want Charles here. He is not some teenaged boy, desperate enough to beg Charles for a touch of attention, for just a breath of affection. And yet here he is, doing all but that. There is no taking it back now, of course. Saying anything else would only make him look even more pathetic -- would only make things worse. Best to leave it as words still floating just-spoken in the air between them, making Charles pause halfway to standing.

“Oh,” Charles says, and he actually _does_ sound surprised. (That’s something, at least, Erik thinks. At least Charles does not assume this of Erik. In Charles’s mind, he still retains some dignity.) “Well, all right.” He sits back down slowly, as if he still expects Erik to renege on his invitation after all. After several seconds have passed in silence he says, “I didn’t mean to avoid you, you know. Not on purpose. And I _tried_ at first, I really did. It was just – our schedules, and then it was –“

“Charles,” Erik says his name with all the steadiness he can muster. “I said you could stay. I did not say you could talk.”

Charles’s mouth hangs open just a second too long before he finally manages to snap it shut. “Sorry,” he says. His expression falters, and then he mutters, a bit more quietly this time: “And, sorry.”

Erik spares Charles a single sidelong glance before he turns his attention back to the brain, transferring it from the scale to the counter. He reaches for the measuring tape and a moment later speaks the organ’s dimensions into the microphone. He still does not have the faintest idea why Charles is here, and Charles seems to be rather devoted to not telling him. Surely – _surely_ – Charles did not come to apologize for having simply behaved as is typical of a broken set. You do not stay _friends_ with your ex. You do not call him, you do not get coffee with him. You are civil, but for the most part, you pretend as if you have forgotten that he exists. Which is what Charles did. No apology necessary.

Erik lifts up the brain again, carefully tilting it to examine the underside.

It could be, a quiet voice suggests in the back of his mind, that Charles wants him back.

He steals another quick look at Charles out of the corner of his eye. Charles has apparently settled into his imposed silence and is fiddling with a pair of surgical scissors, snapping them open and closed once, twice, three times before setting them back down. He is not even speaking. Of course, Erik told him not to, but since when has Charles ever listened to what Erik tells him to do?

He gently palpates the cerebellum before his fingers slip down toward the brainstem.

One would think, though, that if Charles were here to court his affection, he would at least be doing more than idly flicking through Erik’s slide collection. A cirrhosis sample appears to be of particular interest to him; there is nothing to be seen at the macroscopic level but Charles is holding the slide up to the light nevertheless, frowning. Erik is struck by the ridiculous urge to reach out and pluck the slide from his fingers, slip it onto the microscope stage, and let Charles see the tiny patterns that sporl together in the tissue, the blue-stained nuclear sunbursts and the magenta knots of sugar and protein.

Erik is not in the habit of lying to himself. He knows full well that he never quite managed to fall out of love with Charles. Not even a year after Charles had told him he just could not do it anymore and walked out the door -- and not even now. He knows how pathetic this makes him. For the most part, he does his best not to think about it. He might still be in love with Charles, but he _has_ managed to move on. Nothing in his life is suffering for the want of Charles Xavier.

He manages better, however, when Charles is not sitting right next to him, humming quietly and _fiddling._ When Erik cannot stop wondering if maybe – just maybe – Charles’s presence means Charles has found some future for them.

He hopes not.

He does not think he could take it one more time, to lie by and wait as Charles makes up his mind. Or changes it again.

Erik stands and carefully brings the brain over to the prepared jar of fixative, lowering it into the liquid and screwing on the lid.

“Have you finished taking samples from the abdominal organs?” Charles has abandoned Erik’s scalpels at last and is looking at him now, brows arched.

Erik scowls. “I told you not to speak.”

“I know. But have you?”

“Yes.”

Charles nods down at the gaping abdominal cavity. “Then do you need help closing?”

“You’re not a pathologist,” Erik says. “You aren’t even a pathology _assistant_.”

Charles shrugs a single shoulder, fingers catching on the edge of his badge. “No, but I _am_ a licensed surgeon. Closing the chest is a bit of a specialty of mine, in fact.” His lips curve upward. “Besides, I was thinking that we could get coffee, afterward. You’re right, of course. It _has_ been too long. I think we ought to make up for that.”

Erik blinks, feeling rather like he has swallowed a small fish, what with the way his heart is suddenly quivering at the base of his throat. ( _Pathetic_.) He looks closely at Charles, expecting to see the catch written out somewhere on Charles’s features or in the posture of his body. But Charles is simply sitting there, one foot looped around the back of his stool, resting his weight against the table on his elbow, looking expectant and slightly hopeful.

Erik should say no. It is really just – it’s a terrible idea, getting involved with one’s ex in any fashion, even if only for coffee, and even if only to allow him to stitch up a Y-incision, and probably _especially_ if it’s Charles.

“Fine,” he says.

Charles beams, pushing off his stool and snagging a pair of latex gloves from the box on the wall. “Excellent,” he says. “So, do you just – throw those away?” He nods at the abdominal organs laid out on the other counter, samples carefully sliced off and stored away in the refrigerator for later.

Erik shakes his head. “They go back in the body,” he says. "Some people have – superstitions.” He pulls out a fresh cotton drawstring bag. “In here.”

Charles picks up the heart first, of course, turning it over almost curiously in his hands before he places it almost gingerly into the bag. “It doesn’t smell nearly as bad as I expected,” he confesses as he reaches for the spleen. “I always heard stories about young pathology residents running from the room to be sick, first time they had to assist in an autopsy.”

“Well, you weren’t here when we dissected the bowel,” Erik says, not much thinking about the fact that he is making a joke with Charles until after he has already said it. He banishes a small grin and smoothes his face back into something safe, neutral. “Those bodies were probably not as fresh as this one,” he says after a moment. “But you get used to it, after a while. You cannot always get to an autopsy within the first twenty-four hours. I had an intern vomit into the abdominal cavity, once.”

Charles looks as if he is not sure whether he wants to feel amused or sympathetic. “What did you do?”

“Azazel took a photo of him as he was throwing up and posted it on the department corkboard,” Erik says. “And I made sure the intern found a specialty better suited for those with weak stomachs.” He reaches for one of the lungs. “I believe he is now a surgical resident.”

Charles stares at him for a moment. And then belatedly, his mouth thinning: “You’re making fun of me.”

“I’m not.”

“You _are_.”

“No, I’m really not.”

“Who is it, then?”

Erik places the other lung into the bag. “You know I can’t tell you that,” he says.

Charles chews on his lower lip, eyes narrowed at Erik, before the set of his jaw relaxes at last. He shakes his head and grins. “—You’re horrible.”

The last organ goes in and Erik pulls the drawstring tight. “Maybe. But at least I manage to keep my lunch in the right stomach.”

Charles laughs and takes the bag from Erik’s hands, carrying it back over toward the body. “Do I just put it here?” he asks, holding the sack over the abdominal cavity. Erik nods and Charles lowers his hands into the cadaver’s belly to set the bag of organs down atop the spine. “It looks strange,” Charles says. “Empty, like this.” He places the sternum and ribs into the body as well, neatly lined up in anatomical order above the organs, everything in its rightful place.

Erik does not respond; instead, he rolls over the tray that bears all the instruments Charles will need to close the abdomen. “I’ll handle the head,” he says.

They work in silence. Erik settles the top of the skull into its place before he pulls the rumpled face back upward, smoothing the skin over the top of the head to begin suturing it closed. He steals a glance at Charles as Charles is stitching along the mediasternum. Charles stands straight -- surgeon-straight, with only his head tilted down toward the body. He is moving primarily on muscle memory, Erik knows; there is no real need to see the field one is working on, when one has done this same move a hundred thousand times before. His stitches are small and neat, placed close together, as if he is trying to spare the patient a nasty scar. Nothing like the wide, long sutures of a pathologist whose only aim is to close the body cavity tightly enough that it will not split open during the wake. Erik finishes first by a significant margin, tying off his wire sutures and cutting them with pliers.

Were Charles a diener, or an intern, or a medical student – or anyone else at all, really – Erik would have demanded that he hand over the sutures and let Erik finish the job in a reasonable time frame. But it _is_ Charles – and so Erik stands quietly aside, watching Charles’s fingers execute an expert series of stitches, closing up the chest and abdomen and leaving nothing behind but the finest of seams where the skin once was split.

“Is that it?” Charles asks when he is done, setting the sullied tools down on the tray. “Do we need to sanitize the equipment, or – or wash the body?”

“The medical students can take care of that,” Erik says.

Charles frowns. “They’re in school to learn, Erik. Surely they were hoping for something else, from a pathology elective. What are they learning by giving a cadaver a sponge bath?”

“The value of hard work and hierarchy.” Erik strips off his gloves and tosses them in the biohazard bag by the sink. “Wash your hands, and make sure you use a lot of disinfectant. You don’t want to tarnish the sacred with the smell of the profane.”

Charles looks a little put out, but he quite obviously knows better than to challenge Erik’s rules in Erik’s own morgue. So he takes to the sink when Erik is done, washing all the way up to his elbows as if scrubbing in for a surgery. “Where do you want to go for coffee?” he asks. His tone has gone a bit stiffer than it was a moment before.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Coffee Central, then,” Charles says, naming the café on-premises. “I’m doing a Jatene procedure in two hours. I need to stay close by.”

Erik nods. “Let me clean myself up.” It is the one drawback to being a pathologist, he thinks as he strips off his face guard and protective gown in the department locker room. It takes much longer to make oneself presentable for lunch.

\--

6.

When Erik emerges, he has changed from his musty scrubs back into a perfectly-pressed collared shirt and trousers, his white coat slung over one arm, badge dangling from the front pocket. Charles is reading the emergency exit instructions posted on the back of the door, hands clasped behind him.

“Are you ready to go?” Charles asks, turning around when Erik enters the room.

“Yes. One second.” Erik unlocks the top desk of his drawer and finds his phone, slipping it into the pocket of his trousers. He has his pager clipped to his belt already, but he likes to stay connected.

Charles leads the way out the door, though they fall into step beside one another in the hall. Mass General is large enough that one could walk from one end of the campus to the other and never see a single person of acquaintance. But they run into Raven anyway halfway there. She does a distinct double-take when she sees Erik, her mouth settling into a firm frown even if she does not say anything but simply scuttles along to catch up with her attending physician. Erik does not and will never understand how Raven can look at _him_ as if he personally gutted Charles’s puppy when Charles is the one who took it to the shed.

Charles seems to have noticed Raven’s reaction, as well, for he murmurs: “Don’t mind her. She’s stressed; apparently Emma has been giving her a hard time.”

“Ah.”

By the time their silent walk ends at the coffee shop, Erik is starting to wonder if maybe this was not such a good idea after all. Charles keeps fiddling with his phone as if he expects or hopes someone will call him – and Erik cannot stop thinking about the pile of work he has left back in the lab. The work he is neglecting, for Charles.

Charles pays for his coffee, of course, talking over Erik’s objections in that wealthy Beacon Hill manner of his, with “No, it’s quite all right” and “I insist.” It annoys Erik, even as it seems to make Charles somewhat happier; he is smiling by the time they sit down at a bench in the hall, tucking the receipt into his back pocket.

“There’s no need to look so sullen,” Charles says, and Erik snaps his gaze up from where he’s been staring at the pattern of bubbles atop his Americano. “You can buy next time, if you want.”

 _I’m not sullen_ , Erik wants to protest – but he gets the feeling that would only be confirming Charles’s accusation. And he likes the idea, he thinks. Of there being a _next time_.

Charles leans over, blowing on the surface of his tea. “How’s your research?” he asks, glancing up at Erik from beneath his lashes.

“It’s … fine,” Erik says. A moment later, Charles is still looking at him, and so he adds: “I’m working on a project on diffuse intrinsic pontine gliomas at the moment.”

“How fascinating,” Charles says. “Do you have any results yet?”

Erik shakes his head. “We’re still in the data collection phase,” he says. “But that should be wrapping up next month.”

“And what about your cases?” Charles asks. “Anything interesting there?” He has a curious talent, Erik thinks, when he is speaking, of making the listener feel as if he were the only person in the entire world who matters. Right now Charles is leaning forward with his chin resting on the heel of his hand, eyes bright and caught on Erik’s, a half-smile settled contentedly about his mouth. It is why Charles is good for clinical work, Erik thinks, and he is not. Charles actually possesses something remotely resembling bedside manner.

“A few rare tumors lately,” Erik says, thumb picking at a chip in his mug. “And there was a sample from a patient with Alexander disease last week. I’ve never seen that outside of journal articles before.”

“You do like your rarities,” Charles says, lifting his tea and taking a small sip. “I’ve always been surprised you decided to work at an academic hospital and not somewhere like the CDC.”

“What about you?” Erik asks. “You said we were going to catch up. That goes both ways.”

Erik thinks he detects something as it tenses in Charles’s cheek – but he must have imagined it, because a second later it is gone. “The usual,” Charles says, almost airily. “People never stop needing heart surgeries, you know. Raven has been trying to convince me to abuse my position to let her scrub in on more open-heart procedures. She doesn’t seem to understand when I try to explain to her why nepotism is wrong.”

“Is she thinking about doing a Fellowship in cardiothoracic surgery?”

“I have no idea. It seems as if she changes her mind every week, to be honest. Reyes has Raven doing a great deal of work on her service, so who knows? Maybe she’ll end up in trauma.” Charles lifts the string of his tea bag, dipping it up and down twice more before pulling it out of his cup, dragging it against the rim to squeeze out a few last drops of tea before he drapes it against his saucer. (And of course he had requested a _saucer_ , Erik thinks. He has never seen Charles drink tea out of anything but a teacup.)

“I don’t think I could imagine Raven doing trauma,” Erik says.

“Why not?”

Erik glances up at Charles before taking a sip of his coffee, his eyes briefly falling closed. “I think she will _want_ to do trauma. I think she will seriously consider it. But in the end, she’ll be a cardiac surgeon, just like you.”

“Raven doesn’t do things simply because she knows _I_ do them. Especially not when it comes to something like career choice.”

“Oh? It’s a coincidence, then, that your little sister decided to become a doctor – and then a surgeon – and then spend her residency at the hospital where you are an attending?”

Charles opens his mouth, looking annoyed – but then he just shakes his head and sets down his tea cup hard enough that the china clatters when it hits the saucer. “Can’t we have a single conversation without it turning into an argument?”

Erik’s brows lift. “I wasn’t aware this was such a sore –“

“ _Erik_.”

Erik holds his hands palm-upward, in a gesture of surrender. “All right. Fine. What do you want to talk about, then?” Since their families and their ruined relationship are both off-limits, and they have exhausted the topic of their work.

“I don’t know. What we did this weekend. The _Avengers_ movie.”

“Small talk, then. Really, Charles?”

Charles presses three fingertips to the center of his forehead, massaging the skin there in small circles. “Why do you make it so difficult to talk to you?” he mutters, setting his hand back down on the table and catching Erik’s gaze. “The entire time we were in the autopsy room, you demanded my silence. So I was silent. And every time I tried to bring up a line of conversation, you either ignored me or gave me some sterile, clinical response and started ...  cutting things up again. If you aren’t interested in trying to make this work, then you could have just said so, instead of stringing me along and letting me close your cadaver and invite you out for  coffee .”

Erik stares at him. He does not think he has heard Charles be this vocal about his emotions – well, ever. Not with anger, anyway. Not even when Charles left him. It had just been _I can’t do this anymore_ and _I’m sorry_ and _I’m so, so sorry, Erik_.

“And now you’re staring at me again,” Charles snaps after several seconds have passed.

“You’re the one who didn’t talk to me for thirteen months,” Erik says at last. His voice is quieter than Charles’s had been when he is looking Charles in the face, looking at Charles’s unsteady lips and bloodshot eyes. “I think, if I am somewhat reticent, you have no right to complain.”

“I told you I was sorry.” Charles’s voice is soft now as well, his gaze sliding away from Erik’s and falling to the line of his shoulder, to the sharp corner of his shirt and then down the lateral side of his arm.

“’Sorry’ isn’t good enough.” Erik sets down his barely-touched Americano and stands, grabbing his white coat from where he’d laid it across the edge of the bench. “’Sorry’ is what you should have been when you left me because I worked late and spent more time saving lives than I did fucking you. You should have been _sorry_ when you walked out and left me there wondering when you’d ever given me that ultimatum, that I could have you or I could have my career, but never both.”

Charles looks small, still sitting down with his hands curled around his cup, grip loose and his mouth gone still, staring up at Erik as if Erik had just slid a scalpel up between his ribs and _twisted_ it. “Eri—“

“I’m not playing your games, Charles,” Erik says, yanking on his coat. “I’m done here.”

He manages, somehow, by some _miracle_ – to walk out, and to not look back.

\--

7.

It happened thirteen months and four days ago, precisely. The end of Erik and Charles.

Erik walked home that night, in the dusky October air that made the very tips of his gloveless fingers go numb. A season which cast the water of the river into a deep Perls blue -- the color to stain a specimen for iron, the color of cyanide. He was heading home early for once. Seven o’clock. He had thought he might be back in time for dinner … or, if Charles had already eaten, for the leftovers to still be warm.

Maybe, he thought … maybe, since Charles had a day off and Erik was home so early … it had been a while, after all, since they had sex. Their respective schedules simply had not allowed for it, with Charles constantly on call and Erik still gathering evidence for that malpractice suit against Dr. Walker.

In retrospect, it had been a very stupid thought.

The house was dark when he got home. At first Erik thought that Charles had gone out. They had been meaning to replace the light bulbs in the bathroom for weeks now; maybe Charles had finally just gone to the store to buy some –

But no. There he was, in the kitchen with only the light over the stove by which to read. Then again, the book in his lap was closed.

The suitcase, packed, was by the door. Erik had not even seen it when he came in – he only noticed it now because he looked, because something about the dim room and Charles’s grim sort of sobriety and the quiet made him _think_ , made him _dread_ , made him **look** –

“Charles,” he said, and he did not step further into the kitchen. “What’s going on?”

“Do you want to sit?” Charles asked, gesturing toward the other chair at the table. His eyes never left Erik’s face.

 _No_ , Erik thought.

Erik sat.

Charles twisted in his chair. He had been sitting with his knees directed toward the kitchen door when Erik came in, feet flat on the ground, waiting for him. He was not nearly as calm as he was pretending to be. Erik could tell. He could see it in the fine blanched lines on Charles’s brow. He could see it in the way Charles briefly gripped the edge of the table between thumb and forefinger before dropping his hands back into his lap.

“This isn’t going to be easy for me to say.” Charles’s fingers locked together atop his book. “But I think you know – that is, I think you’ve been expecting this, too. We both knew this was coming. It’s just –.” He took in a small breath. And then he just _said_ it, like the words had been burning a hole like acid in his stomach, like he just had to get them _out_ –

“I think we ought to … take a break. _I_ need to take a break. You know this isn’t what I – “

“No,” Erik said, his voice coming out rough as gravel. “You’re wrong.” Something in his mind had short-circuited; all he could hear were Charles’s first words. “I haven’t been expecting this. I _didn’t_ know it was coming.”

Charles looked uncomfortable. “That’s not true, and you know it. We’ve barely spoken for weeks now. You’ve been _ignoring_ me.”

“I haven’t.”

“Yes,” Charles said flatly. “You have. You spend all your time in the lab, cutting up dead bodies on this _witch-hunt_ of yours – you care more about getting people fired than you do about _me_. And you didn’t even –.” He broke off for a second, shaking his head, throat shifting as he swallowed. “It’s obvious that you don’t trust me. And that’s fine. That’s your prerogative. But you can’t be in a relationship with someone you don’t trust.”

Erik remembers how it felt as if something dark and viscous, like tar, was creeping up from his gut. “I do trust you.”

“Just not enough to tell me the important things in your life?” It was, at that point, not possible for Charles’s lips to press any thinner. 

Erik had glared at Charles, at that point, his temper snapping easily over into anger at the first mention of Shaw. Time jerks back to its usual pace, the fog lifting from Erik’s mind. “That was _private_ , Charles! I didn’t tell _anyone_.”

“Azazel –“

“Azazel was _there_. He was a fucking _witness_.” Anger was – is – always is – easier to bear than hurt. “I’m sorry, _Charles_ , that I haven’t been sufficiently _here_ for you. As you recently became aware, I have had _other things on my mind_.”

“I’m going now,” Charles said. His tone was calm again. He did not argue further – and Erik had been furious with him for that, at the time. Erik wanted to battle it out, to drive the topic into the ground, to banish from their life every dark creature which threatened to poison it. He wanted to _end_ it, and have it out and have done, to take Charles to bed and hold onto him ‘til morning.

Charles pushed his chair back away from the table and stood. “I need to figure out … I just don’t know if I can do this. I don’t know if this is what I --  want. And I’m not going to know unless I can find a way to get some … perspective.”

“Fine,” Erik spat, glaring at his hands coiled into fists, flat-out refusing to look at Charles. If Charles wanted perspective – if he wanted to leave – well. Erik wasn’t going to stop him. Let him go.

When he looks back, now, he does not even remember why – why the idea of seeing Charles, in that moment, was so very abhorrent. Maybe it was because he was afraid of what Charles, in turn, would see, if he did.

So he did not look up when Charles walked past, or when he heard Charles picking up his suitcase, when he heard the door fall shut behind him.

He does not know if Charles ever looked back, but he likes to think he did.

In the end, all it took was five minutes. Five minutes after Erik got home, five minutes sitting in a kitchen while Charles broke his life apart.

Mostly he just wishes they had a little more time.

\--


	4. Chapter 4

PART THREE

“Like two doomed ships that pass in storm

We had crossed each other’s way:

But we made no sign, we said no word,

We had no word to say.”

-Oscar Wilde, _The Ballad of Reading Gaol_

\--

1.

The idea had been to sneak into the path lab, to flip quickly through Erik’s records and to assess just how much Erik had discovered in Ira Burns’s autopsy. That is: precisely what kind of probability Charles could assign to his being fired and sued sometime in the next couple of months.

It was not that something had gone wrong. Everything had gone perfectly, by all possible standards of measurement. Charles was _there_ , Erik left him there _alone_ , in the laboratory, while he changed out of his scrubs. Charles had stood by his desk for what felt like hours, his fingertips poised at the metal rim of Erik’s outbox, its contents just above his line of sight on the upper shelf. He can see the edge of the sheet of paper at the very top of the stack, can see the fluorescent overhead light through the vellum, throwing the words typed on the other side into blurry relief. Just two words, in the lower left-hand corner. Charles cannot make them out.

 _Take down the box_ , Charles had told himself. _Take down the box, and look at the paper. Look at all of them, until you find Ira Burns’s autopsy order and Erik’s report. And then read it._

He could not do it, in the end.

He even tried to rationalize it to himself: _It’s only been twenty-four hours, there’s no way Erik’s finished the examination yet_ and _If he had, he wouldn’t leave it in his outbox – if he thought I needed to be taken down, he’d hand-deliver it to the chief – if he thought I was a killer, he would not be letting me take him out for coffee_.

Mostly, however, he is a coward.

He refuses to invade Erik’s privacy.

Even if it means that Erik destroys his career? Yes. Even if.

And after his disastrous failure to have any kind of meaningful conversation with Erik, Charles is right back where he started. Square one. Do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollars, please leave your dignity on the boardwalk.

Perhaps he should simply resign himself to the inevitability of losing his job. It is quite obvious that Erik holds no good will toward him. Or not enough to overpower his sense of integrity, at least. Which – really. Charles should have known. They broke up for the same reason: Erik had his integrity, and he had Charles’s heart. Erik could toss out the second without losing the first.

Charles is sure of that much.

\--

2.

Raven is waiting for him as soon as he gets home.

“What the actual _fuck_ , Charles?” she snaps out immediately, accosting him at the door with her hands on her hips and her lips twisting halfway to a snarl. “I thought you were ‘ _giving him space_.’”

Charles manages to sidle his way past his stepsister to ease into the brownstone, dumping his satchel by the door. “It’s fine,” he says, heading into the hall and toward the stairs. “It’s nothing. And I am.”

“Sure didn’t look like it to me,” Raven says, once again employing her remarkable ability to completely ignore any of Charles’s cues that he did not want to talk about something. She tags along after him, as insistent as any virus. “It looked like a _date_ to _me_.”

“Well, it wasn’t.” Charles wishes he could just take the stairs two at a time. But after ten hours on his feet, his legs ache, and he just wants to lie down. “And even if it was, it didn’t end well. You have nothing to worry about.”

“Fuck that. Don’t worry about _me_. What about _Mary?_ Or Mara, or Moira, or whatever her name is. You know. The woman you’re supposedly seeing.”

“I just told you it wasn’t a date!”

“Coffee with an ex is _always_ a date.”

“—And you are precisely right. I am not in a relationship with Moira. I am _seeing_ her. Among others. Casually. There is a difference, one you will better appreciate in a few years.”

“Jesus, Charles, just because you’re in a pissy mood doesn’t mean you have to be so condescending all the time.”

Charles does not respond to that. He manages to take the last pair of stairs as a double step after all, turning the corner and heading for his bedroom. Raven follows him inside, though she lingers in the doorway for a moment as he toes off his shoes. And then she finally cracks, moving to sit down on the edge of his bed.

“All right,” she says. “So it went badly. What does that mean?”

Charles nudges his shoes under his desk and turns to look at her, leaning back and tilting his head against the wall. “Well, first I went down to pathology and he barely even spoke to me for half an hour.”

“Sounds familiar,” Raven says.

“—And at coffee, we couldn’t make it through five minutes without arguing about whose fault it was that things ended the way they did.”

“His, obviously.”

Charles shrugs and straightens his posture again. “I don’t know,” he says quietly. “I thought I was giving him space, after the split. We both needed space. But then we just – nothing changed. We stayed silent. And from what he said today, I think he was expecting me to make the first move as much as I’d expected him to.”

Raven frowns. “But that doesn’t make sense. You broke up with him. It would be a bit of a dick move for you to try to force him into some kind of ex-boyfriend friendship if he wasn’t ready yet. The ball was in his court, and he didn’t do anything with it. That’s not _your_ fault.”

“Isn’t it, though?” That seems … unbalanced. Unfair. Like a one-way street that goes nowhere, that just keeps circling back in on itself. And it is not as if Charles has not had these same arguments with himself, before.

“ _Yeah_. Look, I know Erik was your first real relationship or whatever, but this is pretty basic stuff. He doesn’t have the right to be upset over the two of you mutually ignoring each other. Key word here being _mutual_.” Raven pushes herself up further onto his bed, curling against the headboard with one of his pillows hugged to her chest. “Besides. He ignored you first.”

“You don’t understand,” Charles says. “It was more complicated than that. He – had a lot going on at the time. It wasn’t _entirely_ that he just –“

“God, are you _defending_ him now? Sure, he had a lot going on in his life. Protip, so does everyone else who made the idiotic decision to become a doctor. It doesn’t make him a super special snowflake.”

Charles sighs and pads his way over to the bed, sitting down at the foot. “You make it sound like I ought to hate the man,” he says after a few seconds, glancing toward his hands, clasped together in his lap. “I don’t. I was in love with him. Unfortunately, he just didn’t love me back. I’m angry, still, but – I don’t hate him.”

It is silent for a moment – for several moments, in fact, and it is only after Charles realizes that the silence has gone on too long that he looks up again – and Raven is staring at him, her hand gone still from where she was picking at a loose thread on the pillowcase.

“—You never told me you were in love with him,” she says.

Charles cannot quite place the tone of her voice; he does not know if it is incredulity, or sympathy, or derision, or something else entirely.

“… Oh.”

Had he not? It seems an oversight, on his part. But then again, not really, because come to think of it, he had never even told _Erik --_

“— **Fuck** ,” he blurts out a split second later.

Raven looks at him like he just sprouted a second head. “Charles,” she says, “Are you –“

“—Yes – no, I’m fine, sorry -- ” he says, jerking to his feet and crossing over to his desk to tug his shoes back on, hopping on one foot for a moment as he struggles with the left. His fingers fumble with the laces, clumsily tying a knot. “I just – I forgot something at the hospital, some … files. Important. I have to run and get them. We’ll talk more later, all right?”

He is gone before she can reply.

He has to tell Erik.

He _should_ have told Erik, a long time ago.

Maybe. Maybe if he had told Erik sooner, if he had told Erik before Erik began to slip away from him, things would never have ended up the way they are now. Maybe Erik would even have said it back.

But of course, Charles never takes risks like that – he takes enough of them in the OR as it is, when it’s someone’s life hanging in the balance. And he knows Erik would never have said those words back, had Charles told him the truth. And how awkward it would have been living with him afterward, if Erik did not return his feelings … sitting in silence at the breakfast table, avoiding each other’s gaze over toast and cottage cheese. The idea of hearing Erik admit it out loud – that he could not love Charles in return, that there was no room in his heart for anything but his work -- Charles could not have borne it.

Or maybe he could have; he doesn’t know anymore. But, thirteen months ago, he did not say those words, and so Erik never heard them.

Now, though … now, things are different.

There is no risk, anymore. What does Charles have left to lose?

It is as if someone has injected him with a full syringe of epinephrine. His pulse is pounding in his ears, his stomach a numb and solid mass lodged somewhere in the vicinity of his chest, his blood sharp and searing as it sings through his veins. He can fix this. God, but he should have fixed this months ago, should have _realized_ , his omission was too significant to ignore.

He checks his watch even as he is heading out the door. Eight-thirty in the evening. Erik will almost certainly still be at work, huddled away in the path lab staring into a microscope. Charles has no illusions that this will solve all their problems, or even that Erik will reach his same epiphany, will even _believe_ him.

Charles is not even sure what he himself wants from this. He still has feelings for Erik, of course. That is a given. But he has tried to move on from them. He has sought out other lovers, and told himself a thousand times why he and Erik would never work, listing all the reasons he left and all the reasons he should never go back. But they can – _talk_ about it. Charles can tell him how he feels, can say that he loved him but he left anyway, and he can tell him why. It’s not much, but it’s something. It’s a _start_.

It is not until Charles is in his car and sitting at an empty intersection waiting on a Back Bay stop light that it hits him like ice pouring down his spine:

This is not going to work.

This is a completely idiotic plan.

What, _realistically_ , can Charles expect to come of this? Erik might laugh him out of the lab. That is the worst case scenario. At best, Erik will look even more uncomfortable than he usually does, will tell Charles that it’s over, it’s _been_ over for thirteen months, and that he’s flattered but Charles should have told him that two years ago – .

A sound escapes Charles’s mouth, something between a sigh and a growl. Even if Erik felt the same way, even if they got back together, it would never last. Erik is no different than he was last year. That much became obvious this afternoon. Charles is chasing after a fool’s dream, that somehow he can slot their lives back together again. Wave a magic wand and make everything the way it _ought_ to have been.

He drives the rest of the way to the hospital anyway. He just wants to talk to Erik, even if there will be no confessions made tonight. He wants to apologize for letting things end the way they did at coffee earlier. He might not be able to move things forward, but he can at least keep them from getting any worse.

But when he gets to the pathology department, Erik is not there.

The windows are dark, and Charles’s key card does not work to swipe him in.

It was a stupid thought, anyway.

\--

3.

Charles met Erik, for the first time, at that gay bar in Bay Village.  At the time, Erik was simply an attractive stranger, sitting with his second clean martini and wearing a white shirt that too clearly showed off the well-defined muscles of his back and shoulders.  Both seats on either side of him were left empty, despite how crowded the bar was this time of night.   It was a mark of how intoxicated Charles was, that he did not even bother wondering why.  He had simply dragged his fingers back through his hair, loosened his collar, slid onto the stool next to Erik’s and said: “Hi.”

Erik took a sip of his drink. “No.”

Charles rolled his straw between his fingers. “Did you know,” he said, going on as if he had not heard, “that the longest empirically-verified period of time any human being has gone without sleep is two hundred and sixty-four hours? I’m on fifty-four, myself. Of course, after around ninety hours, disturbances in glutamate and dopamine levels are severe enough to cause hallucinations.” He grinned, the perfect grin, the grin that always works. “But I know I could never have hallucinated _you_.”

Apparently it was effective, because at least it got Erik to look at him. And he knew he had not imagined the way Erik’s pale gaze flickered however-briefly down to his mouth before settling back on his eyes again. “Does that line ever actually work for you?”

He had a nice voice, Charles decided. Baritone. Very smooth. Faintly accented. “More often than you’d think. Are you Irish?”

Erik looked, for a moment, confused. “No. German.”

“Oh. I must be drunker than I’d thought.” He winked and downed the rest of his Johnny Walker Blue in one swallow, holding up a finger toward the bartender for a refill. “Let me buy you a drink, and you can tell me all about how I might improve my line in the future.”

In the end, it had only taken one more martini for Erik to retract his initial rejection. They hailed a cab at the curb; Charles’s place was within walking distance, but he was too impatient to wait forty-five minutes to have Erik spread out naked on his bed, flushed and hard and wanting.

“Hmm,” Charles had said the next morning, nude and sitting on the edge of the mattress, holding an identification badge up to the silver light streaming in through the open window. The badge must have fallen out of Erik’s pocket the previous night, when Charles was stripping Erik’s leather jacket off his shoulders. “You’re a doctor.”

“A pathologist, yes.” Erik was already dressed, though he lingered in the bedroom, watching Charles with a curious, closed-off look in his eyes. “What about it?”

“Nothing,” Charles said, unfolding himself up from the chair and crossing to hand the badge back to Erik and smile. “It’s just interesting, is all.”

It was meant to be a one-night stand; Charles had not planned on running into Erik again three nights later, standing at the intersection of Cambridge and Blossom and waiting on the light to change. Erik was wearing the same leather jacket as before, only this time his ID badge was clipped to his lapel.

“Dr. Lehnsherr,” Charles had said, flashing teeth in his direction. “Fancy seeing you here.”

This time they ended up at Erik’s place in Cambridge, making out on the T the whole way there, Charles’s thigh pressed between Erik’s, half-climbing into his lap in his eagerness to deepen the kiss. They fucked just inside, against Erik’s front door – and a second time in the shower thirty minutes later, Erik on his knees with Charles filling his mouth and Charles’s fingers twisting in his hair again and again and again.

Afterward, while they were still lying in Erik’s bed with Charles’s head tucked against Erik’s chest and Erik’s hand tracing small circles on Charles’s scapula, Charles had reached over for the pen on Erik’s nightstand and written his telephone number along the curve of Erik’s fourth rib.

So when they met again for the third time, it was no accident. Nor was the fourth, or the fifth, or any time after that.

They moved in together after only two months. Somehow it seemed the right thing to do, at the time. Charles cannot even remember whose idea it was. He only remembers that first night, and the muffled sound of cars on the street and Erik’s soft breathing beside him, the patterns the streetlights cast onto the sheets and how he never, ever wanted to live anywhere else, ever again.

\--

4.

“Have you heard back about the autopsy yet?”

Charles is sitting at the nurse’s station in the emergency department, typing up surgical orders for a trauma patient, fresh from being stabbed in the chest by his girlfriend, with the blade still sticking out of his left ventricle. He looks up when he hears Darwin’s voice, fingers going still on the keyboard. “Sorry?”

“That heart transplant from a week ago. You heard back?” Darwin is leaning against the countertop, and Charles is half-expecting to see something else in his eyes – suspicion, or concern perhaps. But there is nothing except idle curiosity. Small talk.

“Oh,” Charles says. “No, not yet.”

Darwin nods. “I heard they’re pretty backed up down there. Guess that cadaver’ll be pretty ripe by the time they get to him.” He grins; dark humor is nothing that most doctors blink at by the time they are attendings, but the idea still sends something heavy and unsettling dropping down into the pit of Charles’s stomach.

Charles nods. He has a thousand things he _wants_ to say, and every one of them will give too much away. So he remains silent.

Darwin seems to realize that Charles is not exactly in the mood for a long conversation, at least, from the way his gaze goes a bit softer before he speaks again.

“Anyway,” Darwin says, tapping his fingers twice on the counter and straightening back up. “I need to do rounds on some of my patients. Let me know if you need anything on that cardiac puncture wound, yeah?”

“Sure thing,” Charles says, pushing his lips into a smile. He finishes writing the order quickly and uploads it to the system before typing out a page to the team he wants running this surgery. He tries to put Ira Burns, once again, out of his mind. It is becoming increasingly difficult with every day that passes since he found out Erik has been assigned to direct the autopsy.

He meets the puncture wound patient in the trauma bay. Miraculously, the man is still conscious despite the knife thrusting out of his chest. He looks to Charles as soon as Charles enters, craning his neck against the way the paramedics have strapped him down to the table to keep him from moving too much and jostling the blade just a hair to the right and slicing into his aorta.

“Good evening, Mr. Caldwell,” Charles says, coming to stand near the head of the bed. “I’m Dr. Xavier, I’m going to be your surgeon tonight.”

“Am I going to be okay?” the patient asks, his voice raspy as if he has been screaming. “Where’s Linda?”

“She’s fine,” Charles says, even though he has no idea where she is (probably in a jail cell, given that she was on the other side of that knife not too long ago). Best to keep the patient calm. Best to get him into the operating room quickly, and not caught up in an inevitably circular conversation. “We’re going to take you down to surgery now, all right? Just relax and let us do our jobs.”

“Relax? I’ve been _stabbed_ in the motherfuckin’ _heart!”_ The man’s voice rises in pitch. “I’m going to die, aren’t I? I’m gonna die –“

“Believe me,” Charles says, “we have seen it all before. You are not the first person to have a knife removed from his chest.”

“Yeah. But am I going to die?”

Charles bites back the urge to sigh. He is exhausted. He is already on hour twenty-three of this shift, and has not yet had time to take even a brief nap. He is feeling, in temperament, rather like Erik.

“You’re fortunate,” he says. “The CT scan shows a clean puncture. If your girlfriend had twisted the blade, or if you had tried to remove it, you would be looking at much worse odds. There is never any guarantee – and I will not pretend to you that this is not a serious wound – but we will do our best to make sure you come out of this as good as new.” He smiles. “All right?”

“But –“

“Hey.”

Charles glances back, caught off guard by the gruff voice. Logan is standing just behind him, steel clipboard tucked under his arm and a toothpick hanging from his mouth.

“You listen to me, bub. Chuck Xavier here is the best damn heart surgeon around these parts. So why don’t you shut your mouth, and let the good doc take you down and cut that knife out of you. Yeah?”

“Logan,” Charles murmurs, “that is not really –“

“Thank me later.” Logan claps him twice on the shoulder and steps down toward the foot of the gurney, setting his clipboard down between the patient’s legs and popping open the locking mechanism. “All right, folks. Let’s get this show on the road.”

Charles catches Darwin’s eye over the bed and they both take hold of the railings and begin to push the gurney forward, out toward the hall. Logan is the only paramedic in the Boston metro area from whom two attending physicians would agree to silently accept orders. Of course, Logan is an old hand at this; he has been running patients in and out of Mass General since long before either Charles or Darwin got here – and he never tires of reminding them of that fact.

“Where we goin’, Chuck?” Logan calls toward him from the other side of the gurney.

“OR 2,” Charles says. “I paged the trauma team five minutes ago; they should be ready for us by the time we get there.”

“Roger that.”

Logan lingers just outside the scrub room for a few minutes after they get the patient down into the OR. He makes a motion at Charles through the thin window in the door and Charles pushes his way out into the hall.

“Listen, what’s this about you getting investigated?” Logan says in a low voice. The toothpick is gone, his mouth set into a flat line. “Darwin was telling me we ended up losing that transplant rebound I brought in for you the other day. Says the parents are convinced it was your fault, and they’re pushing for an autopsy. Why didn’t you tell me this was going on?”

“You make it sound worse than it is,” Charles says. “Of course no one wants to believe their child is still a drug addict. But unfortunately, he was, and it ended up killing him.”

“You sure about that, doc?”

Charles feels something shiver and catch in his gut, every strand of his attention now focused utterly on Logan. “What do you mean?”

“What I mean is,” Logan says, “it only takes one mistake. One little slip here – “ he taps the center of his chest, right above his heart “ – and it’s sayonara, transplant guy. Not that I’m saying you killed him, but … everybody makes mistakes.” Logan gives Charles a long, significant look. “And you’ve got Lehnsherr on your autopsy. So I’ll ask you again. You _sure_ it was the drugs that killed your druggie?”

“Yes, I’m _su_ – wait. How do you know Erik is performing the autopsy?”

Logan grins. Or, rather, bares his teeth. “Hank McCoy told me.”

“Hank told you, or you _threatened_ it out of him?”

Logan shrugs. “I might’ve … encouraged him a bit, yeah. But he’s a good kid. Plays well with others.”

Charles makes a frustrated sound. “Logan, I appreciate that you’re trying to help, I really do, but eventually you are going to have to learn that some things go _too_ far.”

“Uh-huh. You say that now, Chuck, but I still haven’t told you what else McCoy told me.”

Walk away, Charles tells himself. Walk away. Turn around, go into the scrub room, wash up, perform surgery. _Walk away._

He cannot walk away.

“What?”

“What, what?”

“What did Hank tell you?”

Logan pulls out another toothpick and sticks it between his teeth, and is silent.

“… _Please_. Logan.”

Logan draws the toothpick back out of his mouth.  “McCoy says they ran all the blood work on Mr. Ira Burns,” he says. “They ran another tox screen, on the muscle and hair.  It came back clean.  If drugs’re what killed your guy, they sure as hell weren’t in his system at time of death.”

“Dr. Xavier?” One of the nurses is standing in the doorway to the scrub room. “We’re waiting for you.”

Charles turns away without acknowledging Logan at all, saying a quick “Thank you” to the nurse as he precedes her into the scrub room.

Ira Burns was not on drugs.

No, he corrects himself.

Ira Burns was not on drugs _at the time of his death_.

Or at least, he had been off drugs long enough that traces of the substances would not show up on a standard tox screen.

It is ‘reasonable doubt.’ But Charles, having never been defendant in a malpractice hearing before, has no idea whether that holds up in front of a disciplinary committee.

He cannot concentrate on this surgery. He _has_ to concentrate on this surgery. He is the physician on duty. The only cardiothoracic surgeon on duty. This is his job. After all, it is not that he has never operated under stress before. He is under stress every single day. He does _well_ with stress; it fuels him, it steadies him. It’s _helpful_ , god damn it -- it really is.

He throws the loofah down into the basin of the sink and holds his arms up to be gloved. He forces himself to concentrate on nothing but the movements of his hands, the angle of his wrist as he draws the scalpel down the center of the patient’s chest in the medial sternotomy, splitting him open with the first incision, carefully avoiding the impaled knife.

This is clinical. This is muscle memory.

This is a man’s heart, beating underneath his fingertips.

Charles swallows something that tastes like bile but is not.

“We’re putting him on bypass,” he says.

He works quickly – and in silence, for once. He usually listens to Chopin as he operates, but tonight the sound of his favorite _Nocturne_ rakes at his nerves. _Dun-_ duuuuuh— _dun-_ dah _-duuuuun-dun_. He makes the nurses turn it off.

The heart stops beating when the potassium chloride does its work and the machine takes over. Charles feels a bit steadier now, his hands moving more quickly as he stabilizes the body, clamps everything that must be clamped and has a nurse get sutures ready.

The knife comes out surprisingly easily. _Slip_. He sets it down, carefully, so-carefully, into the proffered evidence bag.

“Keep suction,” he murmurs, and he takes the sutures in one hand. The stitch he must do is challenging, but he has done it before. The curved needle presses in and out of the muscle, drawing torn sides together, puzzle pieces realigned.

His brow is gleaming with sweat by the time he is done, removing clamps and forcing himself to breathe, _breathe_ , it’s all over, it was fine, of course it would be. Was.

 _Is_ \-- fine.

“Restart the heart.”

They take the patient off bypass. The machines whir down slowly and blood perfuses the great vessels once more, flushing the myocardium red and then its natural aubergine. The ventricles and atria thud along, well-balanced and healthy.

“That’s beautiful work, Dr. Xavier,” Emma says next to him, one of the first compliments she has ever given him that was not too-obviously intended to win more assists. (Next to her the trauma surgeon, Dr. Reyes, muffles an amused grunt.)

“All right,” he says, and a nurse dabs a cloth at his forehead to keep the sweat from trickling down into his eyes. “Let’s close him up.”

He holds his hand out for the next instrument and

it happens too quickly for him too see, too fast to predict, in a single

 _\-- spurt –_.

Blood splatters Charles’s mask, a few scarlet streaks strewn up over his right eyebrow and for one reeling second he swears he can _taste_ it, like copper, like acid in his mouth –

The siren sounds.

It screeches in time with his pulse.

He takes in a breath and it rattles down into his lungs, his mind flooded with too many endorphins now, bizarre – fight-or-flight – it uses the same neurotransmitters as the reward process in the brain – and – but Charles has never _liked_ neurochemistry, or the way adrenaline makes his spine feel like a barbed wire fence unfurling down his back, or –

“ _Dr. Xavier!”_

He snaps back to attention. “Give me that clamp,” he orders, and practically pulls it out of Emma’s grasp when she hands it to him. They retract the ribs again, someone insinuating a suction tube down into the rising pool of blood that tides up within the patient’s chest cavity, clearing out the fluid until Charles can see what, precisely, has gone wrong.

It is right there, a loose thread on the aorta, a wiry suture that popped free – blood pressure must have risen too quickly when they took him off bypass, Charles thinks, though the thought barely manages to take root in his mind – and there is a split in the aortic arch, pumping blood out into the space left by the open chest with every contraction of the heart.

“We’re putting him back on bypass,” Charles snaps. And when they do not move immediately, when they take a fifteenth of a second too long to respond: “ _Now!_ ”

Someone unwinds the bypass tubes again and Charles clamps the bleed. He gives the instrument over to Emma to hold while he reinitiates bypass himself, moving quickly and with steady hands, for the moment his primary focus being to simply keep the bleed from getting any worse.

“He’s crashing,” Reyes says. And Charles does not have to look at the vitals monitor to feel the patient’s heart quivering beneath his fingertips, ventricles fluttering uselessly; Charles does not have him on bypass yet and the heart is already beating for nothing.

They try.

They _do_ try.

They do everything in the book, to keep the patient alive.

Sometimes it does not matter how hard you try, or how many standards you follow.

Sometimes, they just don’t make it.

\--

5.

Charles strips off his gloves and protective gear off as he leaves the operating theater, dumping the blood-splattered linens in the biohazard bin. When he washes up he barely feels the water on his skin; it is like it is happening to someone else, some other person whose pale and blurry face is reflected in the window -- some other doctor, with some stranger’s blood on his hands.

Charles staggers out into the hallway and finds himself pressed up against the wall, supporting himself with the narrow side of his forearm as he lurches forward, retching dryly, swallowing and swallowing and swallowing as he fights to keep anything from coming up.

He manages to make it to the bathroom (mercifully empty) before his knees give out entirely. He sags against the inside of the closed door, choking down gasps of tepid air in an attempt to – somehow -- regulate the arrhythmic beat of his heart.

It is just another patient, dead on the table.

Another patient, dead, on the table.

\--No, _not_ that.

Patients die all the time. Especially in heart surgery. This is not Charles’s first, nor will it be his last. Sometimes –

Things happen.

And it is no one’s fault.

And people still die for it.

Charles yanks off his scrub cap so he can drag his fingers back through his hair. After a moment he exhales, long and slow. He is overreacting. It has been a long day. A long _week_. Charles is understandably stressed, but he needs to pull himself together. There are more bodies that will lie on his table today. And he will have to save every single one of them. Their lives depend on him, and their lives cannot depend on him if he is huddled in some staff toilet somewhere trying not to vomit.

Pull – yourself – _together_ , Xavier.

He checks himself in the mirror before he leaves. His cheeks are flushed, his temples still beaded with sweat. He dabs at the latter somewhat ineffectually with a paper towel and tries to rake his hair into order. Undoubtedly Emma will be wanting to know why he rushed off so quickly. He will tell her it was some kind of stomach thing -- very sudden onset of vomiting -- but he is fine now. Nothing contagious. Likely food-borne. He certainly looks the part, at any rate.

Everything, he tells himself – _everything_ is going to be all right.

He tugs at the hem of his scrub shirt once, twice, straightening out any irregularities. A deep breath, and then he is stepping out of the bathroom and back into the hallway. The hospital is not yet busy this time of morning, which is why it ought to have easy to avoid the person who nearly collides with him as he steps out of the bathroom. Except, of course, it isn’t easy.

“I’m sorry,” he mutters, stumbling slightly to the left. His stethoscope slips from his neck and falls to the floor.

The person he bumped into kneels down quickly to pick it up, handing it back to him with a rueful smile. “The fault is all mine,” he says. “I wasn’t looking where I was going.” The man is heading off down the hall a split second later; another surgeon, Charles sees, likely running late for some procedure.

Charles stuffs his stethoscope into his scrub pocket and turns to head back to Ellison Hall – but there is a body blocking his way. White coat-white shirt-no tie. And he would recognize the line of that particular neck anywhere; he knows Erik before he ever even sees his face.

“Are you all right?” Erik says. His gaze flits across Charles’s face, never quite resting on just one feature. Despite his words, Charles can see the tension in Erik’s jaw. He is still upset -- regardless of whatever niceties he is putting on for the public eye.

“Fine,” Charles says, and he forces himself to keep looking at Erik even though something in his gut feels like it is shriveling. God, but he is sure it is obvious – he’s certain it is written all over his face, what happened today and what happened with Ira Burns five months ago. The words that he realized he never told Erik, and now probably never will.

Erik looks like he does not quite believe Charles’s answer; he is frowning, and more deeply than usual. Charles thanks all the gods he doesn’t believe in, that Erik does not ask him again. It is one of Erik’s better qualities: that he never seems to expect people to explain their emotions to him. Their logic, perhaps -- but not their emotions.

“Where are you headed?” Erik asks instead.

Charles glances at his watch – he has lost track of time already, has no idea how long he spent shivering in that bathroom – “Rounds,” he says. “It’s almost seven a.m. I need to do rounds.”

“I’m headed to Ellison, myself,” Erik says. “Let me walk you there.”

“Really?” Charles tries not to snort. “You, leaving the basement? The path department is in Warren, in case you needed a reminder.”

“I have a specimen I need to pick up from cardiac pre-op,” he says. “The diener was supposed to bring it down last night – but of course, incompetency is as infectious as ever. If you want something done right, do it yourself.” He tilts his head in the direction of the elevators. “Shall we go?”

Charles knows Erik is lying. And after having lived together for ten months, he is sure Erik knows that he knows. But he nods anyway and lets Erik fall into step beside him.

“I’m sorry about the other day,” Charles says at last, as the elevator doors slide shut behind them. Alone, in a box, with Erik. He has to speak, if only to fill the space between them. “I was … tense. We have not talked in months, and the last thing we ought to be doing after all this time is simply … rehashing the past. I should not have brought it up.”

“No,” Erik says. “You shouldn’t have.”

Charles glances toward Erik to find him staring straight ahead, at the seam between the closed doors. He is close enough to see the stitching on Erik’s white coat. Close enough to feel the heat of his body, more noticeable in tight quarters.

Charles lets out a soft breath and turns his gaze away, slipping his hands into his pockets, his thumb toying with the clip of his pager. “I want us to be able to start over,” he says.

“And I want to commute to work via rocket ship. Impossible things, you see.”

Charles glances up toward Erik, already preparing words of defense – but it only takes a brief look to see the faint tension at the corner of Erik’s mouth, his gaze tilted down toward Charles – completely indecipherable to anyone else, perhaps, but not to Charles.

“Maybe they are impossible,” he says, and does not look away. “But you know, you might have been head of pathology by now, if you had wanted just a few more impossible things.”

“I do,” Erik says, and with such immediacy that it is almost startling.

But then a moment later, his eyes shadowed and dark and staring into Charles’s –

“-- I want impossible things.”

The elevator doors _ding_ open.

They are standing too close together, Charles notices belatedly. Has it been like this the entire ride? He takes a half-step back, glancing out into the hall.

“This is my stop,” he says, reaching out a hand to keep the doors from closing. “Um. Your samples. Pre-op should be one floor up.”

“Yes.” Erik nods, and there is finally something like a smile on those lips. “I know.”

“Right.” Charles steps out of the elevator, lets his hand fall back to its rightful place. “I’ll see you around, then.”

The doors slide shut and Charles is left standing at the end of the corridor, fiddling with the bell of his stethoscope, until reason finally edges its way back into the forefront of his brain and he turns to head for the cardiac recovery suites.

He feels … quieter, somehow, than he had just ten minutes before. Strange, because Erik’s presence tends to have the opposite effect. Even while they were still together, Erik had always –

Well. No use dwelling on the past.

He is still on shift, all else aside.

He glances through the rack of charts at the nurse’s station, reviewing the details of his current post-ops. There is no mirror on this floor where he can check the state of his hair or the flush of his cheeks; Charles settles for raking his fingers back across the crown of his head once more before he heads into the first room of the morning.

The patient is lying in bed, recently woken by a nurse demanding vitals no doubt, chest still neatly bandaged from his valve replacement. He tilts his head toward Charles when Charles enters, and his eyes have the same bleary glaze to them as do every patient’s on this floor.

Charles sets his clipboard down on the bedside table and smiles.

“And how are you feeling today?”

\--

6.

Charles has never been happier to be home.

For him, home has always been a place from which he would rather run away. Run away to college, run away to med school. Don’t ever come back.

Even after he got his own place, the feeling never quite diminished. It was part of why he had moved in with Erik instead of the other way around. He kept his apartment even while they were together, after all. It was still _there_ , just unoccupied. Left him with the sense of being a visitor of sorts, of hiding away in Erik’s apartment on his off hours instead of coming home to darkened hallways and empty bedrooms. To that irrational sense of dread that would not vanish.

He did not even finish moving his stuff out of Erik’s place until a month after things had ended. It did not feel over, until then. Not really.

Raven is still at work when he gets home. He had meant to meet with Moira for drinks later on – he texts her, makes some excuse he himself only half-believes and then puts his phone on silent.

He has seen enough people, today.

Charles lugs his bag up the stairs to his study, dumping it on his desk chair before retreating to the master bedroom. He leaves the overhead light off and simply flicks on the bedside lamp before dropping down onto the bed. He stares at the amber light as it reflects off the ceiling, fingers folded across his stomach. There is a small stain above him, he notices – a water spot, toward the southeast corner. How long has that been there?

\-- _How long does it take to do a bloody autopsy?_

God, but it has been two _weeks_. What was it Erik had said, about how long it took for decomposing flesh to begin to smell?

Charles does not want to think about it.

But he _has_ to think about it, of course. Because this is his _life_ on the line, his career waiting beneath the blade of Erik’s scalpel.

Once upon a time – it seems so long ago, now – he had been certain he knew the cause of Ira Burns’s death. He had trusted in his own skill as a surgeon. Had he trusted to excess? He had been banking everything on his confidence in his own sutures. _Never had a suture break before_ , he had told himself.

Until today, of course.

Aortic dissections are salvageable. They do not always spell death. It was just this particular patient’s case, Charles thinks. With the trauma to his ventricle, his system could not sustain the crash in his vitals after the stitch snapped.

Charles presses the heel of his hand to the center of his forehead and scrunches his eyes shut. Sutures break. It happens. It is hardly unusual. And yet, Charles cannot help wondering if it could have been avoided – if he had not been so distracted, so upset from his conversation with Logan – if he had just _focused_ , if he had made his sutures just a little wider, if he had taken the patient off bypass a little more slowly –

Round and round and round. He knows how this ends.

He tries to remember the sutures in Ira Burns’s aorta, neat little black lines holding him together. Were there ten, or twelve? Did he double back? He can see the stitches in his mind but he has no way of knowing if they are the right stitches, in the right aorta, in the right patient. _Damn_ it.

Charles’s hand falls to the bed and he opens his eyes again.

Ira Burns could not have had a broken suture, he realizes. There were no signs of aortic dissection. Charles checked his pulses himself; if he had been bleeding out, he would likely have had a higher blood pressure on one arm than the other. The ECG would have shown signs of cardiac tamponade.

Charles tries to remember Ira Burns’s respiratory signs. He cannot remember much; he would have noticed egophony or bronchial breathing, there is no way he would have missed the characteristic moan on inspiration or the heaving ribcage.

Had there been diastolic murmur on the monitor? No. No, he is fairly certain there had been no sign of it.

 _Fairly certain_. Yes, Xavier, great job, you are _fairly certain_ your patient did not have a hole in his aorta. Fabulous work. Well, that’s that, we’re done here, mystery solved. Xavier is _fairly certain_ there were no indications of aortic dissection.

Charles groans out loud, and it takes some effort to keep the sound from turning into a strangled scream. God _damn_ it.

So, essentially, he has no idea if he killed this man or not.

Lovely.

Bloody excellent doctoring.

He should go ahead and turn in his letter of resignation now. Save Erik the trouble.

Charles pushes himself back up and swings his legs off the side of the bed. He is thinking himself in circles again. Apparently it is unavoidable.

He needs that autopsy report. He is driving himself mad, trying to figure out what is true.

Trying to figure out if he is, in fact, one of those same killers Erik is hell-bent on exposing.

\--


	5. Chapter 5

PART FOUR

“For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak

with most miraculous organ.”

-William Shakespeare, _Hamlet_

_  
_

\--

1.

The reception welcoming Dr. Sebastian R. Shaw to his new position as Massachusetts General Hospital Chief of Surgery begins promptly at eight.

Erik shows up at ten, when the festivities are already well underway and he can slip in unnoticed. He does not spot Shaw right off. Shaw, damn him, has the kinds of features which blend into a crowd – an abomination, Erik thinks. Social skills as slippery as the rest of him. By all rights Shaw’s deeds should be etched into his face, his rotten soul visible in rotten flesh: a living portrait of Dorian Gray. 

At last Erik catches him standing toward the front of room, near the dais and its podium, surrounded by a knot of sycophants. A passing server tries to offer Erik a flute of champagne but he waves him off, angling through the crowd toward a relatively unoccupied corner, keeping his gaze trained on Shaw.

Shaw, who is wearing a _cravat_ of all things – and even from here Erik can see his tie pin glittering in the overhead light. Diamond? Impossible to tell. But probable. He has barely touched his champagne. He probably wants to keep a steady head, Erik thinks. _All the better to fuck you over with, my dear._

Erik clenches his teeth. 

He should never have come here. This was a mistake. 

He turns his glare away from Shaw and to Shaw’s swarm of lemmings instead. Head of emergency medicine is telling some sort of joke; knowing him, probably not a funny one. The lemmings are smiling anyway. There is the head of rheumatology, and McCone from orthopedic surgery – a relevant field, obviously kissing up – and –

Charles.

Charles turns his head at precisely the right moment and catches Erik’s eye across the room. For a moment he looks startled – and then sympathetic, with a tight smile and a small shake of his head. He is wearing a suit. A suit, to impress Shaw.

Erik turns on his heel, no longer trusting the expression on his face. It is time to leave. 

He pushes past the cluster of people who are hovering by the refreshment table and out the main door, cutting a diagonal across the corridor and into the men’s room. There is someone standing at the hand dryer so Erik chooses a stall and barricades himself in, dropping his head to press his brow against the cold door. 

_From what I understand --_ Emma’s voice pierces through memory -- _he all but caused you to have a nervous breakdown._

Erik’s jaw is starting to hurt, from grinding his teeth so much.

Fuck Shaw. _Fuck_ him, coming here, latching back onto Erik’s life like a fucking parasite. As if he doesn’t know Erik can make his life a living hell. 

Only –

Erik _can’t_ , of course. Four years ago should have been Shaw’s living hell, but Shaw has the unique ability to turn any situation to his advantage. He has only gained in prestige since the last time Erik saw him – and if he thought Erik could take him down, he would never have come here. 

It’s a _challenge_. It – he is _mocking_ Erik, and everything Erik has worked for. 

Erik thought, when he left New York, that he would be free of Shaw. A naïve assumption; he had learned on his first day just how far Shaw’s reach extended. Shaw’s fingertips, stretching into every corner of his life – when the Dean of Medicine shook his hand, bade him welcome, and said: “Dr. Shaw has spoken so highly of you ….”

Shaw won his case while Erik ran away and hid in Boston. And now Shaw’s back. No doubt he expects a repeat performance. 

Well. Erik is not inclined to perform.

Not this time.

He has worked too hard to make a name for himself, on his own terms. He has his own _place_ here. He even has a reputation, such as it is. He is older, and more experienced, and he will not bend to Shaw’s hand.

Erik lifts his head and takes in a deep, shuddering breath. The bathroom door squeaks open, and then shuts again. He is alone. 

He must admit, he had half-expected Charles to come after him. It is the sort of thing Charles would do, running after an ex-lover through a crowded ballroom like the star in some g-ddamn romantic comedy. Even after a year of silence, Charles would still go for the dramatic gesture.

Erik pulls his fingers back through his hair once. Twice. He is not returning to Shaw’s party; it was stupid, going in the first place. He has work he can do in the lab. At the very least, he can finish revising that damn manuscript. 

Erik twists the lock on the bathroom door, pushes it open, and steps out.

Sebastian Shaw is standing at the sink, adjusting his cravat in the mirror.

The contents of Erik’s stomach turn to molten lead. Shaw catches his eye in the reflection and smiles.

“Erik Lehnsherr,” he says. “What a pleasant surprise.”

The stall door swings shut behind Erik. When had Shaw come in? Erik had last seen him in the ballroom, and the only other person in the bathroom had left –

Of course. Shaw must have slipped in as the man before him was leaving. The inside of Erik’s mouth tastes abruptly acrid. “Dr. Shaw,” he manages to spit out, by some miracle keeping his tone at least somewhat professional.

Shaw finishes with his cravat and turns around to face him. It has been four years, but Shaw has not aged a day. He is in every way the same man Erik remembers. 

“You came to my party,” Shaw says, smiling as he gestures wide, the wave of his hand encompassing both Erik and the door. Such smiles, Erik has always thought, fall so flat on Shaw’s face. “I must have missed your arrival. How are you liking Boston so far?”

“It’s fine.” Erik stares at the spot between Shaw’s eyes. “It is very different from New York.”

“Oh,” Shaw says, “I cannot imagine it’s all _that_ different. You have your subways, and your wealthy bankers, and your chess players in the park, after all.” Before Erik can respond, Shaw continues: “Though I am excited to see a new city, I must say.”

The words are out of Erik’s mouth before he can think to censor them. “Did you achieve your goal in Manhattan, then?”

Erik expects some sort of reaction out of that – and he gets one, just not the one he would have anticipated.

Shaw laughs.

“There was never any _goal_ , Erik,” he says. “I did my job, just like any good doctor would. And I’ve heard that _you_ have become quite the good doctor yourself.” He takes the smallest of steps in Erik’s direction and Erik has to fight the near-overpowering impulse to retreat. “Your reputation is remarkably far-ranging. Even in New York, we have heard the tales.”

Another step – but then Shaw stops, and slips his hands into his pockets.

“You are known for being very detailed. _Thorough_.” Shaw is still watching him, still holding Erik’s gaze -- and Erik wants to look away, but does not dare. “You have come so very far, Erik; I must say, I’m proud. You leave no stone unturned. No tie, untied. --That’s good.” 

Shaw’s gaze drifts from Erik’s down past his throat to his unbuttoned collar – and then along the center of his chest, skimming down to the hem of his trousers before snapping back up to Erik’s face. Erik’s heart is pounding in his ears. His tongue feels dry as sandpaper.

Shaw moves away at last, toward the door – though he pauses there for a moment, his hand still curled around the handle and the line of his mouth going just a little sharper. 

“I can’t abide loose ends.”

\--

2.

Erik is halfway to the bridge over the river when Charles catches up to him. He calls Erik’s name out from all the way across the street, standing on the curb and shifting his weight from side to side waiting for the light to change. When Erik looks back a second time, Charles seems to have given up on patience and is darting through a break in traffic, jacket flapping ludicrously behind him.

“ _Erik!_ ”

Charles stumbles a bit when he tries to slow his pace too quickly, falling into step at Erik’s side. (Even so, he is still half-jogging; Erik’s legs are longer, and Erik makes no effort to shorten his stride on Charles’s behalf.) 

Erik spares him a brief glance. “It’s fine, Charles,” he says. “I’m fine.”

Charles’s cheeks are flushed, likely more from the cold than from exertion. Either way, it looks well on him. 

“Won’t you at least let me drive you home?” he asks.

“I can walk.”

“That’s forty-five minutes!”

“I can _walk_ , Charles.”

“I’m walking with you, then.” 

G-d. Charles is still in his suit; he did not even think to bring along his coat. This is Boston in November, and its effect already shows; Charles is shivering, however much he tries to hide it.

Erik sighs. “We’ll take the T.”

They climb the steps to the platform without words, Charles’s hand trailing along the guard rail. His gaze is fixed on the stairs no matter how many times Erik looks over at him, his teeth worrying at his lower lip, turning it an even deeper red.

“How long did you stay at the reception?” Charles asks as they are waiting for the train, his arms wrapped around his middle for warmth.

“Not long,” Erik says.

Charles lets it lie. 

The train is half-full when they embark; they have to stand at one of the railings, Charles’s ungloved fingers curling around the pole just below Erik’s. He is gripping it tightly enough that his knuckles blanch. Erik redirects his focus over the top of Charles’s head to the advertisements lined above the windows.

They get off at Kendall and Erik takes the steps two at a time up into the square, Charles emerging half a pace behind him. 

“How long have you known Shaw was coming here?” Charles asks, finally looking back up at Erik again. “Why didn’t you say something?”

Erik does not answer, and Charles tries a different tack:

“Erik, this isn’t going to end well. You need to tell someone what happened.”

They round a corner, and Charles has to squeeze in close by Erik to avoid a construction sign. Erik forces himself to think about nothing. Not about Shaw, and not about anything else. A bicyclist whirs past them, scarf drawn up over his nose and mouth to block out the chill.

“I would have helped you, you know,” Charles says after a long pause, his tone a bit softer than before. “If you had let me.”

Erik turns his eyes briefly skyward, and says, “I know.”

He hears Charles’s quiet exhale, and even in his peripheral vision he sees some of the stiffness leaving Charles’s shoulders. After a moment Erik slows his pace somewhat to allow Charles to better keep up. Charles always used to complain that Erik walked too quickly.

They turn onto Erik’s street at last and Charles asks, “Why _didn’t_ you tell someone what happened at New York Presbyterian? You could have told Dr. Erskine, even, when Shaw was hired.”

Erik pulls his key out to unlock the front door. “I couldn’t bear to say it – again – and not be believed.” 

To have Shaw out-politic him again. Out _wit_ him.

“Aren’t you worried he will do it again? Here?”

“Of _course_ I am,” Erik snaps. “Though I don’t see what I can do to stop him. I tried once. You will recall, it did not work.”

He lets them both into his apartment. Charles closes the door more softly than Erik would have, tugging off his suit jacket and hanging it on Erik’s wall hook. Erik kicks his radiator on (blasted dials are broken again, thing only works via brute force) and leads the way into the living room, stripping off his own coat only to toss it over the back of a chair. Of course, then it grates at him, seeing it just dumped there indiscriminately; he picks it back up and carries it into his bedroom, hangs it in the closet. 

When he turns around Charles is standing there in the doorway, clearly uncertain if he ought to enter or simply linger out in the hall. It used to be _their_ bedroom, of course, back when Charles still lived here with him. But now it is just Erik’s, and Charles very obviously does not wish to intrude.

Erik lifts a hand and makes a vague gesture, one Charles can interpret any way he likes. Charles chooses to see it as an invitation; he slips quietly into the bedroom and hesitates for a fraction of a second before sitting down, gingerly, on the edge of Erik’s ( _their_ ) bed. 

Erik flips on his bedside lamp and sits next to him, leaning forward to rest his weight on his forearms, pressed against his thighs. By all rights, seeing Shaw again should have stamped out any sensitivity Erik might have toward Charles’s presence. That it does not, Erik finds frustrating. He is still far too conscious of the brief brush of Charles’s sleeve against his, the warmth of his body heat.

“You could just keep doing what you’ve been doing,” Charles says – and the silence has stretched out so long that Erik has almost forgotten what it is that Charles is responding to. “Do what you’re so good at. Catch him, every time. Eventually they will _have_ to believe you. They won’t be able to not.”

Erik snorts and shakes his head. “I might be arrogant enough to believe that,” he says. “But I am not so naïve.”

Charles ignores him. “Last time, he was a well-established doctor. He had been an attending at New York Pres for years and years – he was _chief of surgery_ , for Christ’s sake. You were new. People didn’t know if they could trust you. So when it came down to your word or his –“

“It wasn’t just _my word_ ,” Erik growls.

“Of course it was.” Charles turns to look at him; his eyes, even in this light, are isosulfan blue. “It’s always a matter of _someone’s word_. You might have had hard evidence from the autopsy,” he says quickly, predicting Erik’s next objection, “but even that is subject to _your_ interpretation. Body after body after body – and you can’t _keep_ a body for more than thirty days. They have to be returned to the family.” A breath’s pause. “Or cremated, as the case might have been with that particular population. And what reason did you have, to think you might need those bodies in the future, as evidence? Your autopsy was all the evidence necessary.”

Erik yanks his gaze away from Charles and glares at the carpet, digging his nails into the palms of his hands. “Since when do you know anything about pathology?” he mutters – but for all his quiet tone, the words are still vicious.

Charles shifts next to him, abruptly uncomfortable. Erik refuses to take the words back. 

The clock on the wall ticks past time, Erik grinding his teeth again. 

Finally, he says: “I wasn’t even supposed to do that first autopsy, you know.”

Charles goes still.

“The order had come down for it, so I printed it out and put it in my inbox and did not think much more of it. I got in trouble for it later, with the head of pathology. Apparently the autopsy order had been canceled for that patient. He said cause of death was reported by the surgeon as complications from a cocaine overdose.”

He steals another glance at Charles; Charles is hanging on to his every word.

Erik presses his lips up into a tight, bitter smile. “I had, in fact, found traces of cocaine in the tissue samples. But it wasn’t cause of death. _That_ was the potassium chloride someone had injected into his vena cava.” 

It was ironic, in the end, that choice of injection site. Had the poison been injected through the IV instead, the drug would have spread almost throughout the entire system before it reached the heart. In autopsy, Erik would have detected abnormally high levels of potassium – enough for suspicion, but not enough for a murder case. As it was, with the injection directly into the heart, death by potassium chloride poisoning had been unmistakable.

Everyone makes mistakes, Erik thinks grimly to himself. Even -- 

No. 

_Especially_ surgeons.

“You know the rest,” Erik says.

How Erik never stopped looking. About dozens of autopsies on Erik’s table, all of the patients homeless or drug-addicted or mentally ill – too often, all three. Sometimes it was potassium chloride poisoning. Sometimes it was surgical error … error no one would prosecute, because there was no family to press malpractice charges. Sometimes cause of death was unclear, even on examination. Those were the most terrifying of all.

All the patients were social undesirables, all had needed trauma surgery for one reason or another, and all had been assigned Sebastian R. Shaw, M.D. as their surgeon. All had ended up dead.

Erik reported his findings to the Dean of Medicine. Everyone had been – on letterhead – _deeply concerned._

Shaw had even met with Erik personally, to express not only his innocence but also how impressive he found Erik’s work. How perfectionism is a virtue -- but sometimes it is taken too far, people drown themselves in the details, and they start to see things that are not there.

He said he took Erik’s allegation very seriously, and he hoped that with time and further evidence, Erik would agree he had been mistaken.

 _Perhaps_ , Erik had said as he shook Shaw’s hand. _But I doubt it_.

There had been a hearing. Shaw’s surgical team spoke in his defense, of course – said they had worked at Shaw’s side the entire time and never seen anything out of the ordinary. (Because they were in on it, Erik had insisted. They had to be. Shaw and his team of eugenicists. He could not possibly have been working alone.)

Before the hearing was even over, Erik knew it was time to leave.

He got an interview at Mass General, and then he got the job. He had stayed in contact with New York throughout the hearing, flying down to give testimony when necessary, faxing over supplementary materials to his autopsy reports. Azazel came with him; he had been working with Erik the entire time, had testified against Shaw, and had started to experience the consequences. 

No one believed them, after all, even before the hearing was through. Erik did not mind the glares in the hallway -- but he did mind it, when surgeons suddenly stopped sending him specimens for analysis. When the head of pathology stopped assigning him to autopsies. 

It is illegal to fire someone for whistle-blowing. It is also illegal to freeze them out (‘retaliatory behavior’), but ice was harder on Erik than fire.

So Erik left, and moved to Boston.

He met Charles, he fucked him, he fell in love with him – in that order. Erik did not tell Charles about Shaw. 

It was not that he thought Charles wouldn’t understand. 

It was just that Erik’s life was different than it had been before.

He had Charles, for one. 

There was no reason to burden Charles with his own nightmare.

He knew how many hours Charles spent at work already; he had seen the redness in Charles’s eyes and the lines on his brow.

No, he had thought. He would not force this on him, too.

But then Erik found out that Shaw had been acquitted, six months after he and Charles moved in together. 

He is not sure what else he ought to have expected. Shaw had money and prestige, and such a combination can buy anything. 

And perhaps it is true, that Erik buried himself in his work for a while. Azazel tried to talk to him about it, at first. He invited Erik out, he offered to assist on some of Erik’s assignments – and, later, after Erik refused for the hundredth time, he said: _You’ve changed_ and, _Do not let him turn you into something you are not_. 

Erik failed to see how it was a bad thing, if he worked just a little harder than everyone else – if he caught the unintentional mistakes the surgeons tried to cover up, if he refused – unlike the other pathologists on staff -- to give false reports just to save a colleague’s reputation.

“I just don’t know why you didn’t tell me,” Charles whispers, clasping his hands together atop his knees. “I would have supported you.” When Erik does not answer, Charles shakes his head and lets out a breath, grimaces. “Instead you just – _abandoned_ me. You never came _home_ anymore. And we never had _sex_ , because when you were home it was only to sleep or do more work from your laptop – “

“It didn’t seem important enough to tell you.”

“Impor – Erik, it was your entire _life!_ It was the only thing you thought about. The only thing you _cared_ about. And don’t say you cared about me, because you didn’t. Not enough, anyway.” 

Charles makes a choked sort of sound and jerks his head to the side, concealing his face from Erik with raised hand. He is quiet for a moment, except for an odd, hitching sort of sound when he takes in a breath. At last he lifts his head again, chin thrust forward. 

“I had to find out from _Emma_. Azazel’s ex- _girlfriend_.”

“I’m sorry,” Erik says.

Charles pulls his hand back through his hair, leaving it tousled. “It doesn’t matter,” he says. “It’s over, anyway.”

“It _does_ matter. Charles – “

“It’s my fault, too. You were my first relationship. Maybe if I’d been more … experienced … I would have known what to say -- But I didn’t.”

“There was nothing you could have said.”

Charles’s skin is pale gold in the lamplight: gold and shadows. “I just wanted to be there for you,” he says. “I’m sorry I couldn’t be.”

Erik shakes his head. “I never let you try.”

They fall silent for several long seconds, seconds that turn into minutes as Charles twists his fingers together in his lap and Erik resists the urge to reach over and grasp Charles’s hands, to still them. 

When they broke up, this discussion had been so … short, so clinical. Erik never told Charles that he loved him so much more than his work, that Charles _was_ more important; he never promised, ‘I’ll make it up to you.’

He had thought Charles understood.

And, so, he had never seen it coming.

“When things ended,” Charles says at last, quietly enough that it takes a moment for Erik to realize he is even speaking --“I thought we were just taking a break. I thought we would just … be separate for a while. Just until things settled down. I didn’t want it to be _over_.” His fingers keep twisting, twisting. “But then you just … wouldn’t talk to me, and I thought – maybe it’s for the best, maybe he doesn’t _want_ this anymore. Maybe I’ve been foolish this whole time, thinking we could still save this relationship – maybe I should find a way to move on.”

Erik swallows something which has suddenly gone thick in the base of his throat. “I didn’t –“ He presses his fingers briefly to his temple, trying to steady his thoughts. “I thought you were ending things. I thought you were – _breaking up_ with me, which is why I tried to stay away from you. It was just … too hard to be around you, after that. When I still wasn’t over you.” 

Erik catches Charles’s eye for a split second, and then looks away. 

After a while, he feels a soft pressure on his arm. When he looks down, Charles’s fingers are resting right above his _flexor pollicus longus_ , his touch light at the center of Erik’s forearm. Erik feels something electric spark beneath that touch, sizzling along the fibers of his nerves. 

“It’s all right,” Charles says – and somehow, when Charles says it, Erik actually believes it. “— _We’re_ all right, now. And this thing with Shaw …. We’ll make it right. He can’t get away with it forever.” Charles smiles, the expression slow but pure on his lips. “We’re in this together now.”

He pulls his hand away but Erik still feels the weight of it there, light and warm, for hours after.

\--

3.

Erik dreamt, that night.

No, not a dream. A memory.

Of once, when they were still young and in love – and Erik rented a car for the day and they drove up to Maine, to go to the beach. 

It was the dead of winter. There was a dusting of snow on the sand banks above the high tide line, a few pools of freshwater frozen to cracked ice from the last night’s rain -- but they were warm in their jackets with their gloved hands laced tightly together, leaning in toward one another as they walked. 

The beach was nearly abandoned. A young family with a golden retriever played along the frigid shoreline in the distance, and from time to time the dog would bark or the boy would shout, their presence briefly audible before their voices were caught up on the wind and carried far out to sea. Beyond that, though: nothing.

Charles had a bag of lemon drops in his pocket. They shared the candy between them -- Erik savoring each piece for as long as he could and Charles always crunching down too quickly, eager for another.

At some point Erik ended up with his arms wrapped tight around Charles, Charles’s hands curled up beneath the lapels of Erik’s coat and his cold nose tipped against Erik’s neck. Erik gazed over Charles’s shoulder at the blue, blue water … he tasted the salt on his lips, mingling strangely – though not unpleasantly – with the sugary lemon. 

“I don’t think we should ever leave,” Charles murmurs. His words were muffled enough, quiet enough, that Erik was not sure he even understands him at first.

By the time he pieced it together, too much time had passed in silence, so he did not speak in response. 

Charles tugged him a little closer. Erik’s fingers spread wide against the wool back of Charles’s coat, gone damp with the spray of the surf.

\--

4.

Erik is in a good mood.

He has been in a good mood since he woke up this morning, two minutes before his alarm. He listened to ‘60s rock music during his ten-mile run to Watertown and back. He hummed in the shower. He even smiled at Azazel when he came into work – an event that only sent Azazel reeling back and begging Erik never to make that face, ever again.

He settles down at his desk and turns on his computer, fiddling with a paper clip and trying to twist it into a star-shaped sculpture while his desktop loads. An icon pops up in the lower right corner announcing that he has seventeen new messages; Erik pulls up his e-mail and browses through the subject lines, triaging them in his mind.

First things first. There is a new order in from surgery. He clicks open the PDF file.

The line for attending surgeon reads: “Dr. S. Shaw.”

Erik’s good mood dissipates instantly. 

He closes the message without printing it off. It is only a biopsy request, nothing more sinister. 

Still.

It is only a matter of time, he can’t help thinking.

Put it aside, he tells himself. Work. Focus on work.

So Erik reaches for his tablet instead, flipping through his to-do list to find the tasks starred as overdue. There is an autopsy with only a week and a half left on the clock. Well. That is surely going to smell delightful.

At least decomposing flesh might distract him from thoughts of Shaw.

Erik rolls his chair back and grabs a pair of scrubs from the cabinet on his way to the locker room, tapping out an e-mail to the diener as he goes, requesting the body be prepped by the time he is dressed.

Even though it is seven-thirty in the morning, the body is still waiting for him when he steps into the autopsy room, waiting naked on the center table. Erik dismisses the diener with a wave of his hand; he does not wish for company, at the moment.

Erik props his tablet up on the counter, autopsy order pulled up to full-screen so he can reference it with ease. He reaches for the voice recorder and tugs it down to his level, says:

“Ira Burns. Autopsy. 7:39 am. Erik Lehnsherr presiding.”

He rolls his chair a bit closer to the table to examine the surface of the cadaver’s skin. The flesh is cold when he lifts the left wrist to visualize the other side of the arm; they keep the bodies refrigerated to slow down decomposition before autopsy. Even so, Ira Burns bears a distinct stench. It smells like standard rotting corpse; in certain cases, the smell of the cadaver itself can lend a clue as to cause of death. Cyanide, for example, has a very particular odor.

He flips on the recorder again. “Externally, the body shows signs of the beginning stages of decomposition. A puncture wound on the left forearm suggests intravenous access, professionally-performed. There is visible distension of the chest wall suggesting several broken ribs. The pattern is consistent with that of cardiopulmonary resuscitation. The body is otherwise normal, length 178 centimeters, weight 60.9 kilos.”

Erik pauses for a moment and reaches for his tablet, scrolling up. “Attending physician at time of death was Dr. Armando Muñoz. Dr. Muñoz was assisted by the patient’s transplant surgeon, Dr. Charles Xa – “

Erik falls short.

He turns off the recorder.

The file reads:

_Patient received heart transplant at this hospital six months ago._

_Surgeon Dr. Charles Xavier, who performed the procedure in April, was present at time of death._

… Right.

Erik stands, presses the call button on the wall to summon the diener. “Get this body out of here,” he says – and it is an effort to keep his voice from dipping into a growl. “Prep a new cadaver.”

“Um. Dr. Lehnsherr, which ca –“

“ _Any_ cadaver.”

He peels off his gloves and tosses them in the trash on his way to the locker room, snatching up his tablet as he goes. 

It all makes so much fucking _sense_.

Why Charles had shown up in his department two weeks ago, when he had never so much as visited before. Why he had suddenly been interested in Erik’s cases. Interested in _Erik_. 

He did not want to mend things between them.

He just wanted Erik’s _leniency_.

Erik has never been one for punching walls, and it takes every ounce of his self-control to sit down on the bench instead of hurling his tablet against the nearest row of lockers. 

It had all been an act. 

Carefully-calculated behavior, intended to garner Erik’s sympathy. And distract him.

Erik should have trusted his gut, that very first day, when Charles was sitting in his morgue and Erik had been _suspicious_ , had wondered as to his ulterior motive.

Erik dated Charles for an entire year. He knows better than anyone that Charles does not have _real_ relationships. He manipulates people. That is all.

He picks up his tablet, turning the screen back on to scroll quickly through the summary page of Ira Burns’s chart. History of drug addiction and bulimia, sober six months, heart transplant. Six months later, in the ED with v-tach deteriorating into v-fib. Dies of unknown causes. 

Surgeon – _Charles_ – suggests drug relapse. Family insists on surgical error, demands autopsy.

Blood and tissue tox screens are both clean.

G-d _damn_ it.

Erik closes his eyes – clenches them shut.

Charles does not want Erik to speak to him.

He just wants Erik to _lie_ for him.

\--

5.

“It’s not assigned to you,” the diener says when Erik emerges from the locker room fifteen minutes later. He cringes a bit when Erik draws closer. “It’s one of Azazel’s, I – “

“Out,” Erik says.

The diener gets out.

He picks up the hard copy of the chart from the foot of the table, flipping through to the summary page.

Attending physician at time of death was one Sebastian Shaw.

Erik almost laughs.

He drops the clipboard back into its metal receptacle and reaches for the voice recorder instead. He speaks the cadaver’s name and the time into the tape and thinks, _fine_. He can do this fucking case. 

“The body bears a number of abrasions of varying severity,” Erik mutters. “Large curving contusion on chest wall is consistent with impact of steering wheel. Lacerations on both arms and the face are both superficial and deep. Gross appearance coincides with the report of a motor vehicle accident.”

He pulls on a fresh pair of gloves.

“Sutured incision in the upper right quadrant of the abdomen reflects the documented surgical intervention to relieve alleged trauma to the patient’s liver. Patient height is 180 centimeters, weight 83 kilograms. Patient is female.”

Erik reaches for his scalpel and presses it to the flesh below the right collarbone, breaks the skin. He makes the Y-incision quick and clean, splitting open the chest and abdomen all at once. The breasts droop off to the side, tugging the skin down with them. Erik cuts through a few bands of fat tissue still holding flesh to bone and the interior of the body is exposed entirely. 

He pauses, scalpel still poised above the sternum.

He looks down at the body spread out on the table before him, at the curled mess of entrails, at the still muscle -- and the liver, bruised from trauma or surgery or both.

He does not want to finish this autopsy.

He is not interested in seeing how Shaw managed to kill this one.

Rage swells up beneath his sternum, twisting and hot as magma – and it rises too quickly, a violent _yank_ within his gut – and he is lashing out before he thinks better of it, throwing his scalpel against the opposite wall – and slamming both hands down on the edge of the table. His elbow hits the tray of instruments at his side and sends them crashing to the ground: blades, forceps, sutures, and all. Erik can’t be bothered to pick them up.

“What will it be?” he snaps at the corpse spread out before him. “ _Dr._ Shaw. What do you _want?_ What would make a grand fucking jury sit up and smile at you?”

He reaches for the clipboard with the cadaver’s chart, flips back through the pages roughly enough that they very nearly tear. He slaps it down on the table, chart open to the diagnostic page. 

“Cause of death,” Erik says, rapping his finger against the page. He feels feverish – dizzy – giddy, in a way, light-headed with his own anger. “Ha – anything but **you** , of course.” 

A sharp grin, wide enough – bitter enough-- that Erik’s cheeks hurt. 

“Cause of death, ricin poisoning. Cause of death -- necrotizing fasciitis. Self-immolation. Or … ‘results of post-mortem examination suggest fatality by bludgeoning.’ Perhaps she is dead of a broken heart? Of excessive meat consumption. The autopsy has shown that the death was caused by the autopsy.”

Erik snaps the chart closed and tosses it onto the nearest counter, leaving his hands free to grasp the edge of the table as he glares down at the cadaver’s open abdomen. 

After several minutes his pulse finally begins to slow. His rage fades, gradually leeching out of his bones, diluted like blood in water. And he is left feeling … tired.

Grand jury – delusions of grandeur – all his. 

Erik doesn’t want to know how this one died. Nor is he interested in helping Charles cover up his brazen incompetence. Charles, who clearly thinks Erik is just as much of an idiot as he is, if he _truly_ believed that Erik would never find out the real reason behind Charles’s abruptly-renewed affection for him.

His head throbs. Something in his chest feels hollow.

“You’d like that too, wouldn’t you?” Erik reaches out and traces the line of the sternal incision. The first cut. He taps, once, above the cadaver’s still heart. “Death was caused by the autopsy. By anything – or anybody – but you.”

He had been right, about Charles playing games. The long game, in which Erik was a pawn, and not the goal. A game in which Charles made all the rules.

So, Erik wonders:

What happens if he refuses to play?

\--

6.

Four years ago, Erik sat in the basement of New York Presbyterian Hospital and stared at a freshly-excised pancreas. 

The abdominal cavity was still only half-emptied. He had gotten into the habit of taking the viscera out piecemeal rather than in one bulk. He liked to examine the organs _in situ_ , not sitting bare and clinical on his counter. 

He weighed the pancreas in his hands, and was palpating the islet cells when the sound of footsteps on the linoleum approached him from behind.

“You should go home, Lehnsherr,” Azazel said.

Erik turned around in his chair and held up the pancreas, twisting his wrist so Azazel could visualize all aspects of the organ. “Does this look distended to you?” he asked.

Azazel leaned forward, frowning. At last, he said: “No.”

“Hmm.”

“Well, you have weighed it?”

“Yes. Normal weight.”

“Then is not distended, no?” Azazel arched one thick black brow.

“Normal weight compared to population _average_ ,” Erik pointed out. “I have no idea what this patient’s baseline is. If he had an abnormally small pancreas, a normal pancreatic weight could be pathological.”

“You think too much.” Azazel picked up one of the jars from the counter and held it out, shaking it a bit, cueing Erik to set the organ within. “Close him up for tonight. Go home.”

Erik shook his head. “It’s one of _his_ ,” he said. “I’m not going home until I’m finished.”

“Then you will be here all night.” Azazel hooked his free thumb at the jar. “It is eleven o’clock. You can finish in morning -- at crazy early time, as usual.”

Erik ignored the jar and stood instead, carrying the pancreas over to his counter and setting it down. He bisected it length-wise with his scalpel and peeled the two halves apart, frowning down at them. He heard the soft _click_ of glass on steel as Azazel put the jar back down, and the even softer sigh that followed. 

“This ... thing, with Shaw,” Azazel said. “I know it is important to you. But there are other important things, too.” 

Erik sliced off a small piece of the pancreas and dropped it into a vial of fixative. 

“Your sanity, for one.”

“I’m trying to work,” Erik said. “If you are not going to assist, you may leave.”

Azazel was silent for a moment, until –

“I know you do not consider anyone your friend,” he said, “but I think of you as mine. And as your friend, I have to tell you: you are taking this too far. There are other pathologists in hospital. We all want to see this end right. Let us help.”

“No.” Erik’s expression was cold when he turned back around, his hand white-knuckled around the handle of the scalpel. “If you can say things like ‘you are taking this too far,’ then I don’t _want_ your help. There is no ‘ _too far_. _’_ Shaw is a killer.” Erik slices into the pancreas again, with perhaps a little too much vigor. “Somehow, I seem to be the only one in this hospital who takes that with any sort of gravity. 

“For every day that we spend in this lab, _not_ cutting open Shaw’s victims, there is an entire _white board_ of patients lined up for trauma surgery on Shaw’s service! Go up to the emergency department right now, and you’ll see it. And every name on that board is another potential dead body on this table if we don’t stop him. If you cannot realize that, then I do not want you _touching_ this evidence.”

Azazel held his gaze for a few seconds before his eyes at last slid away, first to the right, and then down. 

“I understand,” he said. 

A brief silence, and then the sound of Azazel’s steps retreating. But he paused for a moment in the doorway, to add: 

“But you should know: you are not alone as you think you are.”

Erik cut another sample from the pancreas with steady, steady hands, and he did not answer.

\--

7.

Erik has them bring Charles’s cadaver back in when he is done with Shaw’s.

He pays the autopsy every bit of attention it deserves.

He spends hours at that table, the smell of dead flesh thick in his air.

He does not miss a single detail.

\--


	6. Chapter 6

PART FIVE

“The truth is rarely pure, and never simple.”

-Oscar Wilde

\--

1.

When the page comes in, Charles is lying in the dark on the bottom bunk in the on-call room. It is hour twenty-one of a twenty-four hour shift. 

The page is for a patient who just arrived on the helipad with severe trauma to the chest and abdomen; they suspect damage to the mitral valve. They need a cardiac surgeon.

Which is how Charles, as the only cardiothoracic surgeon on call, ends up in an operating theater, cutting side-by-side with Sebastian Shaw.

He is up to his wrists in the patient’s chest cavity when Shaw glances over at him and says:

“How long have you been a surgeon here, Dr. Xavier?”

It is an unwelcome distraction, given that he is trying to place a barely-stable patient on bypass. 

Were it anyone else, Charles would have reprimanded him … but this is Shaw. Not Erik’s Shaw, or at least not only that. Shaw, the chief of surgery. A certain respect is demanded – or at least the illusion of it, whatever feelings one may harbor in private.

“Two years,” Charles says, keeping his gaze trained on the aorta he is carefully transecting. “And a Fellowship here, before that.”

“You look very young to be a surgeon.”

It is a comment that Charles finds very well-worn. It is always spoken with the air of faint surprise, a polite sort of condescension – and despite Charles’s age, or his qualifications, his appearance unfailingly ends up being sufficient justification for a mild but sustained brand of superciliousness. Charles frowns and sets his scalpel aside, reaching for the bypass tube instead.

“Where did you do your residency?” Shaw asks. The knuckles of his left hand almost brush Charles’s right as he sutures a tear in the patient’s liver.

“Mayo Clinic.”

“That’s an excellent program.” 

Charles does not answer. He assumes the statement speaks for itself; it demands no response. Giving it one would detract his attention from the delicate task of sliding a plastic tube up into the patient’s aorta, to pump his blood back out of the bypass machine and to the rest of his body. 

To his credit, Shaw seems to get the message. At the very least, he is relatively quiet for the next several hours - barring what is necessary to request instruments or aid from the nurses and residents. 

The patient ends up needing a valve replacement. 

“Porcine,” Shaw comments when the valve arrives, glancing over at the organ lying in its tub of ice. “Interesting choice. Don’t bovine valves last longer, with the new anti-calcification treatments?”

Charles nods. “Eighty percent of the bovine manufactured valves reach twenty-five years before needing to be replaced,” he confirms. “You’re right; porcine valves are more prone to calcification. You’re looking at fifteen years for the average patient. Eighteen, at most.”

He lifts the valve gently from the tray and holds it up to the heart, assessing where he needs to trim the edges to make it fit with the patient’s natural structure. 

“Then why –“

“Mr. Edgington is fifty-two years old,” Charles says. He gestures for a nurse to hold a basin beneath his hands, and reaches for the scissors. “He would need another surgery to replace this valve, either way. He has a better chance of surviving that operation at seventy than he does at seventy-seven.”

“Ah.” Shaw’s brows lift over the frames of his surgical glasses – and Charles has never gotten very good at reading facial expressions in surgery, not when the mouth and nose are concealed by masks – he has no idea what Shaw is thinking. But then Shaw adds: “That is very forward-thinking of you, Dr. Xavier. Your reputation was well-earned.”

Charles quickly occupies himself with trimming down the valve, hoping to keep his own face perfectly neutral. With luck, Shaw will interpret it as humility in the face of flattery. The truth is that Charles feels sick to his stomach. 

He does not want Shaw’s compliments. He does not want Shaw thinking about him at all.

They finish the surgery in comparative silence. Afterward, when they are peeling off their gowns and washing their hands in the scrub room, Shaw stands next to him at the sink and says:

“You have skilled hands, Charles.”

The use of his first name sends something sick shivering down Charles’s spine. Shaw is smiling when he looks over to him. 

“… Thank you,” Charles says, a second too late.

“I had heard great things about you.” Shaw turns the water off and reaches for a paper towel. “I see now that they are all deserved.”

Shaw can’t know that he and Erik are – _were_ – involved. 

… Could he? 

Surely thirteen months later, that news is not still traveling through the grapevine – he could not be hoping to use Charles against Erik, even now –

“I’m free for the next hour or so,” Shaw says, turning to face Charles more fully. “I was thinking perhaps we could walk down to Beacon Hill and get a cup of coffee. I am interested in hearing about your plans for the future, and for your career.”

… _God_. No wonder Erik cannot stand the man. Even if Shaw had not caused the deaths of dozens of people in New York, Charles thinks he would still leave a bad taste in his mouth.

“I’m sorry,” Charles shakes his head, “but I have a rather large stack of paperwork waiting for me back in my office that I’ve been avoiding. Perhaps some other time.”

“Ah,” Shaw says. “Paperwork. The bane of every surgeon’s existence.” He makes a dismissive motion with one hand, still smiling. “Better get to it, then.”

Charles leaves quickly. Shaw may be the new chief, but Charles is not obligated to spend any more time in his presence than absolutely necessary.

\--

2.

Charles runs into Erik on the ground floor when he comes up just behind him in line at Coffee Central. Erik is tapping out a text message on his mobile and frowning - with the same darkness to his expression that Charles had seen him wear too often in the last few months they were together.

“Hey,” Charles says.

Erik’s spine goes stiff before he even glances round, his frown somehow even deeper than before. Charles feels something within him go still and cold, caught by Erik’s narrow glare. 

“Did something – “ Charles’s throat feels dry “ – happen?”

Erik does not answer; he simply pushes past Charles roughly enough to throw Charles off-balance, stumbling to the side as Erik cuts out of line and stalks off down the hall, people parting before him as if they know better than to get in his way. Charles is left standing there alone, his lips still parted slightly – everyone in line staring at him, he can _see_ the questions, the curiosity written across their faces –

Charles seizes hold of something in his gut, something hard and unyielding. He murmurs “Excuse me,” and slips out of line as well. 

Not to follow Erik. He heads for the Pit instead. He has no more procedures scheduled until this evening. He had planned to use this time to work on his newest manuscript, or a letter of recommendation for one of the graduating medical students on his service. But now …. Now, he cannot bear the idea of sitting alone within the four walls of his office, staring at a computer screen and trying not to think – trying not to  wonder  –

Christ. 

Erik knows.

He has to know. He did the autopsy; he cut Ira Burns open and peeled apart his aorta and perhaps ran the pad of his thumb along the flesh left tattered by Charles’s scalpel -- and he _knows_.

Charles swallows several times in quick succession, trying to choke down the sudden tide that threatens to rise up into his mouth. He takes the stairs down to the basement; he does not trust his stomach to stay where it belongs, and no one in a white coat should be caught vomiting in the hall like a common intern. 

He manage to make it downstairs without his lunch making a reappearance. He pauses for a moment at the base of the stairwell, however, combing his fingers back through his hair and trying to rake his nerves back under control. He needs something to do. 

_Not_ \-- Not surgery. Something small and easy and impossible to fuck up. 

Charles pushes open the door and steps into the emergency department proper. It looks like a busy night. Good; they will need his help.

He heads for the nurses’ station. Darwin is there, leaning over the counter and scrawling something out in his near-illegible handwriting on someone’s chart. 

“Hey,” he says, glancing up when Charles approaches. “Dr. Xavier. Are you looking for a particular patient?”

“I was hoping you might have something for me to do, actually,” Charles says, waiting for a nursing assistant to pass by with arms full of empty bedpans before stepping back behind the counter.

It is a credit to his character, Charles thinks, that Darwin does not ask questions. He just nods and reaches for the stack of charts by the computer, flipping through them until he finds a red-tagged folder. “This one is complaining of chest pain,” he says. “He just got in, so we haven’t been able to get a doc over to assess his rhythm yet. You want it?”

“Yes,” Charles says gratefully, and he accepts the chart as Darwin passes it over. 

Darwin finishes up his work and exits, headed for the next patient in his line-up. Charles steals one of the nurses’ chairs and opens up the first chart across the desk, reading through the first page. __

_78 y/o white male c/o angina, dyspnea, light-headedness; Hx of high chol.; 911 call reported DFO; when EMTs arrived on scene pt was lying supine and appeared pale & diaphoretic …._

Charles focuses on the words. He pronounces them carefully in his mind, links them with their associated meanings, slowly pieces together a sentence.

He organizes the information with care, filing it in the forefront of his mind, and stuffing everything else – Erik – away into the shadows. He feels steadier by the time he stands, tucking the chart under one arm and carrying it with him to the patient’s bedside.

Logan is there already, jotting down the insurance information as dictated by the patient’s wife. He darts a quick glance at Charles when Charles draws the curtains closed behind him, giving them a small amount of privacy even in a busy ED. 

“Mr. Winston,” Charles says, painting his expression into that small, polite smile he has learned is most effective with the patients: mannerly, confident, not too cheerful but not too grim, either. “I’m Dr. Xavier, I’ll be looking after you today. Why don’t you tell me what brought you into the ER this afternoon?”

“I’m not tellin’ you. I already told _them_ why I’m here,” the man snarls, shifting on the bed and crossing his arms over his stomach. It nearly tangles his IV line and he curses, unwinding his arms again. “Everyone keeps askin’ me that question, and I keep tellin’ them, and I’m sick of it - I told _him_ ,” he says, jerking his head toward Logan. “Why doesn’t _he_ tell you?”

“I’m sure you’ve spoken to a lot of people today,” Charles says. “But I need to hear _you_ tell me what’s going on. In your own words.”

“Wait –“ the patient points at Charles’s chest, his glare sharpening. “Your coat says ‘ _Cardiac Surgery_.’ You a _heart_ surgeon? I don’t need a goddamn _heart surgeon_. I don’t need to be _here._ I’m not havin’ surgery. I wanna go home. My wife’s gonna take me home. Everyone’s been askin’ me too many damn questions, tryin’ to give me _surgery_ –“

Charles nods silently, as empathically as possible, as the man speaks. He glances at Logan, who points to the chair at the bedside. It’s going to be a long afternoon.

Logan follows him out after Charles finally manages to get a straight story from the chest pain patient. At first Charles thinks he is just headed back to his truck – but then Logan tails him all the way back to the nurses’ station, and stands over him when Charles sits back down in the desk chair.

“Yes, Logan?” Charles asks several seconds later, once he absolutely cannot bear the silence any longer.

“What’s wrong with you?”

Charles purses his lips. “ _Nothing_ is wrong with me. Don’t you have patients? 911 calls to get back to? _Lives_ to save?”

“First things first,” Logan says. “Something’s up with you, Chuck. Don’t bother denyin’ it; I can tell. So spit it out.”

“I told you – “

“I said, I can _tell_. You’ve got that whole -” he gestures vaguely at his own face “—hard-on-the-outside, wibblin’-mess-on-the-inside, violent-breakdown thing goin’ on. Very Lehnsherr, you know. So, what is it?”

“It’s been a long day. It’s also none of your busine— “

“Fuck that. McCoy told me Lehnsherr finished that autopsy of yours. Lookin’ at you, I guess the results weren’t exactly what you wanted.”

The nausea is back, all at once and at full force. 

So Erik _did_ finish the autopsy, then. Charles had been right. And that must be why he … _reacted_ the way he did, this morning, when Charles tried to speak to him. Because he realized … that Charles ….

“Chuck? – _Chuck_ , look at me. Hey –“

Charles takes in a sharp and shallow breath. And then a deeper one, trying to drown the nausea out with air. He drags his gaze back to meet Logan’s. Logan has the strangest look on his face, his brows knit together and his lips curving definitively downward – Charles would say Logan looks _concerned_ , almost, except he has never known Logan to be concerned about anyone before, for any reason –

“Sorry,” he all but gasps out a moment later. “I’m fine.”

Logan looks unconvinced. “You sure you’re not about to puke or pass out on me here?”

“Positive,” Charles says, even if his smile is a bit too weak to be convincing. “And I haven’t seen the results of the autopsy yet, actually.”

“Are they on the server?”

Charles shakes his head, fingers drifting down to his pager. “If they were, I’d have been … notified.” The system would automatically e-mail him when the report was available, and Charles had preemptively set it up to have all e-mails from the sysadmin forwarded directly to his pager.

Of course, there was a small delay, with that. By the time the email notification arrived, Shaw might have already paged him with his disciplinary notice. Shaw, or the Dean of Medicine.

Charles frowns a moment later, something finally clicking together in the back of his mind. “—You’ve been asking McCoy about me?”

“’Course not,” Logan says. “He just –“

Charles lifts a brow. “—Volunteered the information?”

“Yeah.”

Charles lifts a brow.

A second later, Logan gestures at the chart. “What are you gonna do with him?”

“It looks like a heart attack to me,” Charles says. “I’ve put in a stat order for IV Coreg and a draw for cardiac markers. He’ll probably be admitted overnight.”

“So how much longer do you, personally, need to sit around in the Pit and wait on this guy?”

So that’s where this is headed. “… An hour?” Charles estimates. “Long enough to make sure he’s stable and see that they have a bed for him upstairs.”

Logan grunts. “Good. And then you’re getting out of here, Charles. Take a fuckin’ break. Yeah?”

Charles nods. “I will.”

Logan makes another gruff, unidentifiable sound and walks off. The nausea surges up in Charles’s throat again the moment he is gone. Charles sets the chart carefully back into its slot on the rack, rolls his chair back from the desk, and heads for the nearest staff restroom. Walk, he tells himself. Do not run. Be calm. Collected. … _Assured._ He keeps his lips pressed tight together and navigates down the hall, side-stepping a team of paramedics with their gurney – and he somehow manages to make it, to slip into the bathroom and lock the door behind him before staggering forward and vomiting rather violently into the toilet.

When it’s done, he hits the lever to flush and sinks down the wall, sitting on the cold tile floor and letting his eyes fall shut. He deserves this. He knows he does. It was … so stupid, not to mention the laceration in his report. God, but even adding it belatedly would have been better than not saying anything at all. The cut had been nothing; he cuts aortas open all the time on _purpose_ , and he always just stitches them shut again afterward – and then it’s _done_ , it’s over with, the patient goes home and grows old and everyone’s happy. 

But this time it wasn’t on purpose, and Charles made a mistake – and it was barely his second year as an attending; he had not been able to stand the idea of admitting to something like that so early in his career. Especially when no one had gotten hurt. When everything had – he choked back a laugh – _turned out okay_. 

Okay for him, at least. Okay for the hospital. Okay, for everyone but a bulimic druggie who didn’t even know how to take care of his goddamn _new_ heart.

Though, of course, Charles cannot forget: whatever the patient’s problems, he had still been _Charles’s_ patient.

Is – Charles’s patient.

Pride. He has too much _fucking_ pride. 

He had always thought himself above such things, honestly, and yet – here he is, here is where he has ended up. Proud. A proud fool.

It might not be his fault Ira Burns died, but Erik sure as hell will think it is. And he will take him down for it. 

\--

3.

Charles ends up in the basement of Warren, having thrown up twice more before leaving the emergency department. His stomach is empty; nothing left in his gut but bile and guilt.

He catches Azazel in the hall outside the path department, lounging in one of the common room armchairs and eating lo mein out of a carry-out box. Azazel does a double-take when he sees him, staring at him for a second with noodles still hanging out of his mouth before he chews, swallows, and says:

“Xavier, what are you doing here?”

“I’m here for Erik,” Charles says. “Is he busy?”

Azazel rolls his eyes and sets the take-out box aside, wooden chopsticks sticking haphazard out the top. “He is Erik. What do you think?”

There is a moment of silence – and Charles does not think he is imagining it, the way it feels slightly uncomfortable, stretching out between them – before Azazel speaks again.

“He is in lab. You want me to let you in?”

“Please.” 

Azazel unfolds himself out of the chair and walks over to swipe his card through the reader. The light turns green as the latch audibly unlocks. “Good luck,” Azazel murmurs the very second Charles is stepping through the door, quietly enough that, at first, Charles almost believes he has imagined it.

Erik is sitting at his desk, gazing into a microscope and fiddling with the focus dials. He does not even notice Charles coming in, although several of his colleagues glance up and frown at him as if he entered with the sole intention of distracting them from their work. 

Charles walks as quickly – and as quietly - as possible to Erik’s workstation. He sits down at the empty desk next to Erik’s and rolls the chair closer, whispering Erik’s name.

Erik’s head snaps up – and Charles cannot help the way he flinches back when their eyes meet. Erik has never looked at him like this before – as if he would like nothing better than to drive a scalpel into Charles’s throat. Charles finds himself torn between which emotion is more prominent on Erik’s face: disgust, or loathing. 

Erik simply … _stares_ at him for a moment, and then he is pushing his chair violently back and standing, abandoning his workstation to stride off toward the door which connects the path lab to the morgue.

Charles sits in stunned silence, feeling the sharp gazes of the other pathologists needling into the back of his neck – bloody vultures, circling their kill - until he realizes that perhaps Erik means for him to follow. 

… At any rate, he is certainly not going to sit and wait _here_.

Charles’s cheeks are burning by the time he pushes through the door and into the morgue, and he has never in his life felt more like a specimen in a petri dish than in that moment. He has no idea if the others know he is Erik’s ex, or if they simply assume he is another errant surgeon Erik has decided to take down. Frankly, he is not sure which would be worse.

Erik is standing near the far wall when Charles enters the room: the wall made entirely of metal, drawer after drawer containing the bodies of the dead. The room is ice-cold, refrigerated to preserve the cadavers, but Erik has removed his white coat nonetheless; Charles sees it tossed across the back of a chair, the cuff of one sleeve nearly dragging against the floor.

The door falls shut behind Charles and Erik reaches out a hand, plucking the label from one of the drawers just behind him.  
  
“Ira Burns,” he reads. His gaze snaps up again, toward Charles. “Thirty-one years old. Male. Recovered drug addict --” (and Charles is not imagining it, the way Erik’s lips tighten just a little at that) “-- and bulimic. Received a heart transplant in April from a young, bright-eyed new surgeon. Died in October from sudden cardiac arrest. And suddenly, that bright-eyed surgeon is loitering around my lab, wanting to _talk_.” Erik slips the label back into its place, his eyes colder than the air around them. 

“Erik,” Charles says – in no more than a whisper. He does not dare move closer, no matter how much he wants to touch his fingertips to that tic in Erik’s temple, to smooth away the hard lines on Erik’s face.

“Shut up, Charles,” Erik snaps. “You lied to me. You led to me to believe you wanted -- You insinuated yourself back into my life, and all because you knew I had this body on my table and you were afraid of what I might find. You  manipulated me. So you will forgive me if I am not interested in hearing whatever else you might have to say.”

“That’s not – “ Charles starts.

He had meant to say, _that’s not true_ – only it _is_ true. That is precisely the reason Charles sought Erik out, the reason why he had even bothered trying to patch things up between them. 

But it had not stayed that way for long.

“I never stopped missing you,” Charles says. “I miss you as much today as I did that first night I spent without you.”

Erik gives him a cold look. 

Charles bites the inside of his cheek, steels himself before he continues. “I did not speak to you because I was – selfish. Or afraid – and yes, maybe the reason I was finally able to seek you out again was a little less than honorable, but … it means _more_ to me than that. I ….“

God. If he says this, there is no turning back. No _taking_ it back, once those words fall from his lips. If he speaks, then Erik will _know_ … and he will never not-know, ever again.

Charles takes that step forward at last. Erik’s gaze follows his movements warily, thoughts shuttered and unreadable in his face. He imagines that look of loathing back in Erik’s eyes – but just that quickly he remembers other looks, as well. Softness, and affection, and that gleam of amusement every time Erik took off his clothes and Charles suddenly lost the ability to speak.

“I loved you,” Charles says. “I – _still_ love you, in fact, and I – “ 

He cannot read Erik from here, he cannot detect the faintest shift in his expression, he cannot see –

“I’m sorry,” he keeps on, even as he feels his cheeks growing warmer again – and that sickness is back, clawing at the inside of his stomach. “I never told you, and I should have. I don’t know why I didn’t – I just - ” He bites down on his lower lip, hoping the brief spike of pain will shock him back into a steadier state of mind. “Have you ever felt something so strongly that you can’t imagine everyone else doesn’t feel it as well, just by looking at you? When that feeling consumes everything else you’ve ever felt and it’s so much a part of your – your _everything_ that you forget you never actually said the words out loud, that they were never just - _painted_ across your skin - ”

He can feel his very pulse in his veins, tingling all the way to his fingertips. He wants to take the words back almost as much as he refuses – with a new sort of brashness – to be ashamed of having said them.

He waits for Erik to speak, or to see some hint of feeling betrayed by his features or his posture … but the seconds draw out between them with nothing but the echo of Charles’s own voice in his head to mark their passing. And then –

“You lied to me,” Erik says at last. His tone is unchanged, as frozen now as it was five minutes ago. “I’m afraid that gives all the rest of your words somewhat less weight, in my mind.”

“Erik –“

“Get out.”

Anyone else – any other moment – Charles might have argued. But Erik has turned his face away, gaze fixed on one of the drawers on the orthogonal wall, looking anywhere but at Charles himself. 

So Charles goes, slipping out of the morgue and through the lab, past all the pathologists with their sharp eyes and hard frowns. Past Erik’s abandoned desk. 

He pauses there for a moment – looks at the violet-stained slide still lit-up on the stage of Erik’s microscope, the notepad scrawled full with Erik’s ever-illegible handwriting, the small ceramic owl figurine that Erik’s mother gave him on his last birthday before she died, all of Erik’s neatly-arranged pens.

Charles reaches up and unclips his badge from his collar. He places it, photo down, next to the microscope.

He takes in a breath, a deeper one than he has managed so far since leaving Erik’s presence. His mind buzzes dully, thoughts tattered and wordless.

His fingers linger on the edge of Erik’s desk before he forces himself to step back. One foot in front of the other. He steps … and at last, at _last_ \--

He walks away.

\--

4.

Charles hadn’t always wanted to be a doctor.

He was not one of those children who got a plastic stethoscope for his birthday and toddled around after the adults, begging to take their temperature or listen to their pulse. He never even watched those medical dramas on televisions that everyone else in college seemed to adore. He never had a tragic life-threatening illness that inspired him to seek the path of healing. He did not hurl himself headlong into the cutthroat pre-med battle for top orgo grade, though he was aware these practices existed. 

No. Charles fell into his profession quite by accident. He used to want to be a scientist. A geneticist, actually, working to identify markers for the development of illnesses like Parkinson’s disease and breast cancer. He spent hours sitting on a lab bench, volunteering as a research assistant for one of the foremost geneticists in the country, preparing cell cultures and carefully extracting long, gooey strands of DNA from rat embryos. 

He loved research. He _did_ , really, it was just – well. It was not at all that research was fruitless. It was simply that the fruits of that labor took years and years to gather. And once gathered, they were published, where they were then ripped to shreds by one’s academic competitors. Replication would be demanded. More grants to be applied for, more hours sitting on the bench doing the same damn thing one had been doing for the past year and a half, but slightly different, _slightly_ different. And then the results from these studies would be analyzed, and published, and criticized. And never – not _ever_ , it seemed – did the findings from the laboratories ever creep off the pages of _Nature_ and _Cell_ and to the patient’s bedside.

So, while sitting with the application form for the Duke department of genetics open on his laptop, Charles decided to take the fight to the trenches. He applied for medical school. And then he got in.

He always thought it was something he might regret – that he might end up looking back one day and wondering about what might have been, about whether he would have been better spent working in a laboratory instead of a hospital. But he never did. 

There is one question that every would-be doctor fears upon his or her application to medical school:

“Why do you want to be a doctor?”

The secret is, one is never supposed to say, ‘because I want to help people.’ Admissions committees see this response as trite and naïve, to be met with a scoff and a suggestion that one had better head to the nursing school down the road. Of course – other, perhaps even more honest – answers are equally unacceptable. One is not supposed to cite reputation or salary, or even the fact that one’s parents were doctors with inspiring careers. ‘Appearances are all you care about?’ they would ask. ‘Money is all you care about?’ ‘Are you too cowardly to step out from beneath your father’s shadow?’

At the time of his interviews, Charles was not aware of any of these rules. “I want to make a difference,” he had said, bright-eyed and young and earnest. “I like science, I want to apply it to real life problems, not just theoretical ones.”

Maybe his answer _was_ trite and naïve, but it got him into medical school. So perhaps it did not matter as much as everyone said it did, in the end. The thing is, though, that Charles still means it. After four years of med school, a five-year residency, and a three-year fellowship in cardiothoracic surgery – after everything they said would demolish naiveté and gut his desire to do good – after all that, he still believes it as whole-heartedly as he did in his interviews fourteen years ago. 

He used to think he was a better doctor for it.

Now, he is not so sure.

The email notification is waiting for him, when he gets back to his office. 

The autopsy report for Ira Burns has been uploaded to the server.

Charles almost does not want to read it. He knows what he will see.

\--

5.

He reads it anyway, of course.

The report says that Ira Burns died due to complications associated with an eating disorder. Analysis of the patient’s stomach contents and heart tissue revealed high levels of ipecac.

Excessive ipecac use, the summary reads, can cause severe injury to the myocardium. Even one dose can be fatal. 

Ira Burns’s transplanted heart shows extensive signs of damage consistent with ipecac use. 

_Ipecac_ , Charles finds himself thinking. Ipecac. Really: excessive use of the word _ipecac_ in this report.

Strange word, too. Doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.

Too much ipecac, and the report says nothing about the tear in Ira Burns’s aorta.

It does not mention it at all.

\--

6.

Erik calls Charles’s cell about an hour after Charles gets home.

Charles almost does not answer. But it is too much, in the end, to have Erik on the other end of the line and not to pick up – and so he does, curling up in the downstairs armchair with tea (Earl Grey, spiked with rum) in hand.

“Where are you?” Erik says the moment Charles picks up. He sounds as sharp – as angry - as he did that afternoon.

Charles sinks a little lower in his chair, pulling his feet up onto the seat and his knees to his chest, the mug of tea balanced between them.

“At home,” Charles says. “Why –“

“Don’t go anywhere,” Erik says, and then he hangs up.

Charles obeys. What else would he do? He doesn’t have anywhere else _to_ go, at this point. 

He is still sitting in the same chair, in fact, by the time the knock comes on his door. Charles buzzes Erik in and a moment later Erik is striding into his living room, stripping off his scarf and coat as he goes.

“You forgot this,” Erik says. He pulls Charles’s badge out of his pocket and slaps it down on the table by Charles’s armchair. 

Charles glances down at the photograph of his own face smiling up at him. What was it Erik had called him, again? _Young, bright-eyed new surgeon--_ The man in the photo is barely recognizable to him, now. 

He leaves the badge where Erik has placed it.

“Did you quit?” Erik asks at last.

Charles shakes his head. “Not yet.” 

Erik frowns at him, his eyes narrowed slightly. 

“I’ll turn in my letter of resignation tomorrow,” he says, when Erik’s silence draws out too long. “Effective immediately.”

“Why?” This time, Erik speaks so quickly that he all but cuts Charles off.

Charles laughs – or, he almost laughs; the sound is more pained than anything else. “You know why,” he says, his gaze finally dropping away from Erik’s. He stares down into the dark surface of his tea instead, gripping the mug a bit more tightly between his hands. “I shouldn’t be practicing medicine. What happened with Ira Burns has made that inescapably clear.”  
  
Charles is not imagining it, he thinks, when he manages to lift his eyes again - that Erik’s frown has deepened slightly, a crease drawn between his brows.  
  
“You saw my autopsy report, didn’t you?”  
  
“Yes.” Charles presses his lips tight together for a fraction of a second. “I saw you lied for me.”  
  
Erik shakes his head, once. “I do not lie. Not for any reason, but especially not in my reports.”  
  
“Oh?” It is Charles’s turn to have his voice go colder. He thinks, if he tightens his grip on his mug any further, the ceramic might shatter. “So what was all that about ipecac poisoning, then? You saw the tear. I know you did.”  
  
It is the first time Charles has put his own mistake to actual words - the first time he has said it aloud. And, of course, if he is wrong – if Erik had not noticed the tear – then he has just effectively destroyed his career in a single moment. 

He finds he does not care nearly as much as he would have thought. He is not interested in concealing this from Erik. Not anymore, anyway.  
  
But Erik had known. There is no change in his expression - no flash of shock, no growing disgust.  
  
There is just the same hard look in Erik’s eyes as he says: “My job is to identify the cause of death, and I did precisely that. Ira Burns died of ipecac cardiomyopathy secondary to bulimia nervosa.” He arches a brow. “What else would you have me say?”

“The _truth_ ,” Charles says. “All of it.”

“That _is_ the truth,” Erik growls, taking a sudden step toward Charles. “You are the one who cannot seem to stop lying. First to your team, when you made the error – and then in your chart, when you failed to report it.” Erik’s mouth twists. “And also to me, let’s not forget.” 

Charles bites down hard enough on the inside of his cheek that he tastes copper.

“Fortunately,” Erik continues, “in this case, your personal irresponsibility was not a contributing factor in your patient’s death. …But it won’t always be that way. And when you do inevitably kill someone, I will not cover for you.”

Charles takes in a small, unsteady breath. And he had not realized how dizzy he’d become; the room feels as if it is tilting on its axis, his heart racing inside his chest. 

“I wouldn’t expect you to,” he says.

He remembers the moment that suture snapped in his trauma patient’s aorta, the heat of the blood splattered across his face mask. People die. Sometimes it is not the surgeon’s fault; and sometimes it is. 

How many other mistakes has he made? How many deaths he thought were unavoidable were due to his own recklessness? His arrogance?

He does not realize he had been shaking until Erik’s hands are pressed to both his forearms, stilling him. 

“Charles,” Erik says – and he slips the mug of tea from Charles’s hands, setting it aside on the table next to the badge. A moment later Erik’s fingers are twining with Charles’s own as he kneels down on the floor in front of Charles’s armchair.

Charles stares at the hollow beneath the styloid process of Erik’s radius, that small dip along the lateral side of his wrist. 

“Look at me,” Erik says.

And so Charles does – he looks, at the furrow along Erik’s corrugator muscle - the tension tugging the corners of his mouth downward, the elegant line of Erik’s nose. Erik still has that small scar, he sees: thin and white, cut across the skin above the orbicularis oris. 

“Look me in the _eye_ , Charles.”

Charles obeys. Erik’s eyes are close to his, now. His irises, usually so mutable in color, look almost green at this angle. The pigment has a fractal pattern, Charles observes – as if pieced together from shards of stained glass. His pupils are large and dark.

Erik exhales, and Charles can feel that breath on his own lips.

“Everyone makes mistakes.” Erik’s thumb is smoothing along the outside of Charles’s, a series of slow strokes. “Even me. It’s not a matter of always being perfect.” For a brief moment, his mouth twitches, very nearly into a smile. “Which is exactly why we have malpractice insurance.” 

“You get people fired over mistakes all the time,” Charles protests. “How is this any different?”

“I get people fired when their mistakes _kill_ people,” Erik corrects him. “And it’s never the first time they’ve made such a mistake, believe me.”

Erik is silent for a moment, his thumb still tracing circles on Charles’s skin. Not for the first time, Charles wishes he knew what he was thinking – that he could just slip himself into Erik’s mind and unravel all the tangled thoughts he finds impossible to understand. It has always been impossible, from the outside, to tell what Erik is feeling. 

“I don’t know if I can trust you,” Erik says at last. “I want to. But you still lied. And you were planning to use me, and my feelings for you, to get information about my progress on the autopsy.”

Charles swallows. “Erik, I –“

“I just want to know one thing,” Erik says, keeping doggedly on as if he had not heard Charles at all. His thumb goes still on Charles’s hand at last. “You said you loved me. This afternoon, in the morgue.”

Charles sits, frozen, tethered to Erik’s words, every thought in his mind abruptly cut short - 

“Did you mean it?”

The air is thin when Charles inhales; his nerves feel as if they are stretched taut where his and Erik’s skin meet. Charles tightens his fingers around Erik’s, squeezing their hands together with just a little too much force. 

“Yes,” he says. “I did.” And – “I do.”

Erik makes a sound in the back of his throat, something both strangled and incredulous all at once. 

“I never stopped loving you,” Charles says. Now that he’s started talking, he does not think he can stop. “I never stopped wanting to be with you. Even with the way things ended – “ 

He bites his lower lip, and he is not sure there is any way to make Erik truly understand what it was for him – or the way it felt, when Erik stopped coming home, when Erik finally said Shaw’s name and Charles looked him up on the internet -- and the way it felt as if he had swallowed lead, that moment he first saw a photograph of Shaw’s face. When he realized he was not the most important person in Erik’s life anymore.

“I liked the way you made me feel, when I was with you,” Charles whispers. “I loved you more than anything in the world, and I didn’t know …. I didn’t understand why you couldn’t -- I didn’t know how to make you feel the same way. About me.”

Erik’s eyes fall closed for the briefest of moments – Charles’s gaze falls to his lips, lingers on their familiar curve and he imagines leaning forward to close the inches which separate them – pressing their mouths together and sinking his hands into Erik’s hair –

\-- but then Erik opens his eyes, untangling his fingers from Charles’s, standing. Charles locks his fingers together in his lap -- and he has to bite his lower lip again to keep from saying anything he might regret. 

Erik’s face is as unreadable as always. Charles wants to scream with frustration, with the utter injustice of it all, that his feelings should be written so obviously across his own features and yet Erik manages to remain impenetrable as steel.

Erik takes a step back – and Charles surges to his feet a second later, rising into the space Erik has put between them. He does not second guess it. He cannot afford to question himself, because if he does – if he does, he knows he will think better of it – he wouldn’t be curling both arms around the back of Erik’s neck, wouldn’t be drawing himself up on the balls of his feet and kissing Erik as if it is the last thing on earth he will ever do.

Erik’s surprise is a small gasp trapped between their lips … and Charles just kisses him harder, slipping his tongue along the seam of Erik’s mouth and trying desperately not to think about what it means if Erik does not kiss him back. He takes a fistful of the collar of Erik’s shirt and tries to memorize the feel of him, the warmth of his skin and the slight scratch of his stubble against Charles’s chin – the familiarity of his mouth, the way Charles knows how to bite _there_ , at the swell of his lower lip, to make Erik moan and sink his hands into Charles’s hair, to pull him close at last.

Erik tastes like coffee; he must have downed his cup on his way over, or right before he arrived. Black: no cream, no sugar. Charles remembers.

Charles slowly relaxes his fingers at Erik’s shirt, lets his hand slip down Erik’s spine to rest at the small of his back. It feels daring, in a way such touches never used to. It reminds him of those first few weeks, when Erik was waiting for him every time he got home and wearing nothing but his white coat – when Charles used to page Erik up to the supply room on his lunch break to push him back against the wall by the massive boxes of latex gloves and palm him through his trousers.

Erik is clearly thinking along the same lines; they are pressed close enough together that Charles can feel the beginnings of his arousal stirring against his stomach, an inch or so above his hipbone. 

Good, Charles thinks. 

…Yes. 

This is good.

Erik’s tongue is in his mouth, now, hot and sliding against Charles’s own – and Charles does nothing to disguise the shudder that accompanies the groan he muffles against Erik’s lips. Erik’s fingers tighten in his hair, tugging his head back enough to deepen the kiss, Charles rising up in turn to compensate for the angle.

“I’ve missed you,” Charles manages to say a moment later, when Erik has shifted to brush kisses from the corner of his mouth along his cheek, toward his jaw. “So much.”

Erik’s fingertips drag down the back of his neck. “I know,” he whispers. “Charles, I –“

“Ssh.” Charles catches his lips in another kiss, silencing Erik’s words in his mouth. “Don’t speak.”

He leads Erik upstairs by the hand, pausing to kiss him again on the landing, Erik’s body trapping him against the wall and his fingers making quick work of the buttons of Charles’s shirt. Erik’s touch grazes bare skin and Charles hips tilt sharply forward.  
  
Erik gets his shirt open – and he is grasping Charles’s thighs a moment later, hitching him up against the wall - Charles curling his legs around Erik’s waist for balance - and Erik’s mouth is on his chest, teeth scraping just below his right clavicle, tongue twisting around a peaked nipple.  
  
 _God_ \- when it is Erik’s hands on Charles’s body, somehow it always manages to feel like the first time - and Charles reacts too easily and too intensely to every touch, his breaths gone shallow and his eyes fluttering shut. Erik notices, of course; he makes a low sound, something almost like a growl, in the back of his throat and bites just a little too hard above Charles’s sternum. That will leave a mark by morning, Charles knows. 

He finds he does not care.

“Bedroom,” he manages to say, once he has regained his ability to speak. Raven shouldn’t be home until eight, of course, but there’s really no telling -- “Can’t …. Not here. Come on.”

Erik flicks his tongue against the bitten skin and obeys, moving back – enough to let Charles slide back down the wall to stand on his own two feet, but not quite far enough to put any real distance between them. Charles all but drags him the rest of the way down the hall and into his room, Erik pushing the door shut behind them with his heel. 

Charles stops him there, pressing just the tips of his fingers to Erik’s chest and taking three steps back. He lets his gaze drop, lingering on the rise-fall of Erik’s shoulders as he takes in quick, shallow breaths – on his narrow waist, and the swell of his cock pushing the fabric of his trousers taut.

“Take off your shirt,” Charles says.

Erik immediately applies himself to the task, slipping each button free slowly, deliberately, his eyes half-hooded and fixed on Charles’s mouth. Charles shrugs off his own shirt a moment after Erik and pretends not to notice the way his own trousers have started to become a bit uncomfortably tight. 

“Just throw it on the floor,” Charles says, nodding toward the shirt in Erik’s hands. 

Erik hesitates for a fraction of a second before he obeys, the cotton dropping into a crumpled heap behind him. 

Charles is having a difficult time keeping his gaze above Erik’s waist. Even from here, he can tell that Erik is fully hard – and he finds himself wanting desperately to put his mouth _there_ , to lick and suck at him through the layers of cotton and wool that separate them. And – why not? 

He moves forward and sinks down to his knees in front of Erik, his palms smoothing up Erik’s thighs to rest on his hips, holding him steady as Charles leans in – as he parts his lips and wraps them around Erik’s still-clothed shaft. 

Erik’s hand is back in his hair almost instantly – though he doesn’t pull Charles forward, he doesn’t force him closer; it’s hesitant, in a way, like he still isn’t sure Charles really wants this, or like he expects it to end at any moment –

Well, Charles thinks, let’s disabuse him of that notion, shall we?

He undoes Erik’s belt buckle in a few quick movements and drags Erik’s trousers down. It’s easier now, with Erik in naught but his briefs, to get enough of Erik’s cock in his mouth to see Erik _truly_ react. He sucks at the head, hard enough to feel Erik’s fingers tense in his hair – and licks down the line of his cock, toward his balls. He takes his time. Let Erik feel unsatisfied, he thinks. Let him _ache_ for more. 

Erik’s underwear clings to his cock where Charles’s mouth has been, and Erik’s grasp in Charles’s hair finally twists, sending a sharp jolt of pain through Charles’s scalp.

He hums out his amusement against Erik’s shaft before he lifts his head, lips half-curled into a smirk. “Yes?” he asks.

Color has flushed high in Erik’s cheeks, his pupils blown out nearly large enough to obscure the irises. “Get on with it,” he snaps after a brief, tense pause.

“Doctor’s orders?” Charles arches a brow.

_“Yes.”_

“Then aren’t you glad, Dr. Lehnsherr, that I always take a physician’s advice?” He hooks his thumbs under the waist of Erik’s underpants and strips them down past his hips. 

Erik’s erection bobs free half an inch from Charles’s lips – but Charles just rises to his feet and moves away again, toward the bed. He hears the rustle of Erik kicking both trousers and underwear off and aside, even if he cannot see it himself.

Charles pulls open the drawer of his bedside table and finds what he needs: a condom, which he places by the lamp, and a small tube of lubricant. Erik approaches slowly, wordlessly. When he is close enough, Charles reaches for his wrist and squeezes lube onto his palm.

“I want to watch you touch yourself.”

It has been too long … and god knows he has had his fair share of fantasies about this very thing – Erik, alone at night, pumping his hand up and down his cock and biting back Charles’s name on his lips.

“What about you?” Erik says, his gaze following as Charles tosses the tube aside.

“I can take care of myself,” Charles says. He enjoys the way Erik’s eyes go just a bit darker at that.

A second later, Erik reaches down to take his cock in hand and it feels as if all the blood in Charles’s body rushes south. Erik’s cock is large and thick – cut, and curving just slightly to the right. He strokes it slowly – slow enough to be torturous, even watching it – and Charles is quickly fumbling with his own fly, undoing the zip and pushing down his own trousers.

Charles climbs onto the bed, watching Erik – still unable to decide if he prefers the sight of Erik’s hand winding around his cock, or the tiny, controlled expressions of pleasure that flit across his face as he does so.

Charles closes his hand around his own cock, with a few firm strokes down the shaft before he is slicking his fingers with lubricant and reaching back, between his legs. The first finger is fine – the second makes Charles’s breath catch in the back of his throat and he sinks back a little against his hand. 

Erik’s pace quickens only a little, but Charles does not miss the way his teeth briefly catch on his lower lip – or the sudden flush to the head of his cock.

Neither of them can look away, now – even when Charles’s vision flares white in the moment that the tips of his fingers first graze the soft flesh at his prostate. 

And that seems to be the _coup de grâce_ for Erik, the absolute most he can take without touching, because he is following Charles onto the bed a moment later, slipping his free hand around the back of Charles’s neck and pulling him forward into another kiss.

Charles moans out loud – and again, louder, when Erik releases his cock to press his hand down alongside Charles’s own – when he pushes in past that tight ring of muscle at Charles’s entrance. Erik’s fingers are long enough to find his prostate with ease. Charles yelps and grasps at Erik’s shoulders for balance, a spike of pleasure hurtling up his spine.

“That’s not fair,” he gasps, brow pressed to Erik’s collarbone and his nails digging into Erik’s skin. “— _Fuck_ –“

But Erik just laughs, low and husky, and does it again. He leans forward, brushing a kiss against the crest of Charles’s ear. “There hasn’t been anyone else,” he says. “There’s been no one, for me, since you.” 

Charles’s clenches around their fingers and he drags his other hand down Erik’s arm, leaving a trail of reddened scratches in its wake. He cannot return Erik’s declaration – and he knows Erik does not expect him to – but of the people he has been with in the past year … with every single one of them, he had wished for Erik instead. For Erik’s hands, and mouth, and words in his ear.

“I’ve wanted you so badly,” Erik says, moving his finger within Charles once more. “Your removing yourself from my life didn’t make it any better. And then when you were back –“ He rocks his hips forward, dragging his erection against Charles’s stomach. “I was certain it was written all over my face, all the things I wanted to do to you ….”

Charles cannot wait any longer; he draws his fingers free and Erik replaces them with his own, stretching him out with a vicious sort of patience, each caress of his fingers rattling Charles right down to his bones. 

“Like what?” Charles asks – breathes – against Erik’s neck. His mouth finds the hollow between the sternocleidomastoid and Erik’s jaw, kisses right above his pulse point, feels the carotid thrumming along beneath his lips.

Erik scissors his fingers inside Charles and the ache is dizzyingly sweet. “It was the worst, the other night, on the train,” he murmurs. “You didn’t have a coat. You were cold, and your cheeks were red …. I wanted to press you up against the doors and fuck you as we crossed over the river, just to warm you up. I didn’t care if anyone saw us; I wanted everyone to know you were mine ….”

Charles is practically straddling Erik’s lap by now; at some point Erik must have eased back and Charles forward in tandem, leaning flush against Erik’s chest as Erik draws his fingers almost entirely out – and then _pushes_ in again - as if to mimic what he would have done to Charles on the subway, if he had the chance. Charles slips a hand down between their bodies to wrap around his own cock, pulling along his shaft in quick, rhythmic motions, hips jerking up toward his own hand with each stroke. 

“And again, at my apartment, when you sat on my bed.” Erik pauses only long enough to scrape his teeth along the lobe of Charles’s ear. “I thought you had to know, what you were doing to me – the way you sat on my bed like you _belonged_ there.” His breath is hot on Charles’s skin; his is cock hotter still. “You do,” he says – his voice quieter now – softer, as Charles’s thighs tighten on either side of his hips. “ _Belong_ there.”

Charles makes a sound that he knows – he _knows_ – is far too desperate – and he arches his back, pressing forward until his knuckles are skimming along the underside of Erik’s erection every time he thrusts up into his own hand. And that’s Erik’s tongue on his neck - sliding along the sinuous curve of his jugular, the scent of sex and perspiration mingling on Erik’s skin when Charles buries his face in Erik’s shoulder. 

God – and it must be Erik, it must be something about the cadence of his voice or the dexterity of his fingers – or just how long Charles has wanted this and still not been able to have it – because Charles has never come so hard in his life, his thoughts screeching out into high-pitched white noise, heat flooding out to his entire body. 

Erik is grinning by the time Charles is able to open his eyes again … to relax back, slightly, and actually look at him. Erik brushes a small kiss to his temple. Then, a second later, he is reaching down and skimming his fingers through the wetness Charles has left smeared across his stomach. And – oh _god_ , Charles’s cock throbs, _hard_ , and if it were possible to come a second time he surely would have, in that moment – Erik lifts his hand to his mouth and licks it clean.

Charles realizes he has been staring at Erik, wide-eyed and with his mouth hanging open, when Erik laughs. A second later, Erik pulls his fingers free from Charles’s arse and grasps his hips with both hands, pushing him from his lap and onto the bed. 

“Condom,” Charles reminds him – because with that look in Erik’s eyes, he’s liable to forget.

“What?” Erik’s brow lifts. “Do you have something contagious?” 

“ _No_. It’s just … good practices, is all.” Charles feels heat rising in his cheeks again – because he knows Erik has not slept with anyone since him - and with Charles’s come in his mouth, Erik has already made the point moot. 

But Erik nods once and leans over, having to stretch out quite a bit to reach the condom Charles had set down on the bedside table. Charles takes the opportunity to spread out a bit himself, rolling onto his stomach and drawing his knees up toward his chest so that when Erik turns back around he finds Charles with his hips thrust upward enough to be decidedly lascivious, smirking at him from where he’s rested his chin on crossed arms.

He relishes the sound of the quick breath Erik takes in, and the way Erik’s gaze slides down his body, lingering on his arse.

“Come here,” Charles says.

Erik obeys, dropping the condom on the bed next to Charles’s right knee as he presses a kiss to the small of Charles’s back. His tongue flicks out into one of the small indentations on either side of Charles’s spine, just above the curve of his arse. “You,” Erik says, “have magnificent _fossae lumbales laterales.”_ Charles feels Erik’s lips stretching into a brief smile against his skin. 

Charles snorts, and Erik just licks again, at the left dimple this time. 

“I suppose,” Charles says, “that you now intend to compliment me on my stunning lumbar spine?”

Erik makes a soft, amused sound just above the L4. “It is rather exquisite,” he murmurs – and his mouth moves higher, dragging up toward the thoracic vertebrae. “But … no. I was actually planning to remark upon your …” he bites at the ridge of Charles’s scapula and Charles shivers just slightly “ … acromian process.” 

“I’m sure this is quite an experience for you,” Charles says, smirking just out of Erik’s line of sight. “Finally getting to feel up a _living_ body, for a change.”

“Don’t get cheeky, now.”

Charles laughs, and Erik swats him on the arse. 

A moment later Erik pulls back, and Charles hears the tear of a condom wrapper followed by the snap of the cap on the bottle of lube -- the wet sound of Erik’s hand stroking twice down his cock. 

Erik’s lips find the base of his neck. “I will say, though … your _vertebra prominens_ is very nice, as well.”

Erik pushes his slickened cock between the cheeks of Charles’s arse, hands grasping Charles’s waist for leverage as he begins, slowly, rolling his hips down against Charles’s.

It is torturous, of course – each forward thrust drags the shaft of Erik’s cock against Charles’s sensitive entrance, but he bites down hard on his lower lip and does not complain. After all, turnabout is perfectly fair play –

\-- And so, when Erik starts to draw back, letting go of Charles’s hip with one hand to guide himself in, Charles twists himself away. “Wait,” he says. “Not yet.”

He glances over his shoulder at Erik, who is looking at him with a frankly dumbfounded expression on his face. “What do you mean, _not yet?”_

“Exactly what it sounds like,” Charles says, hips dropping back into their original position. “Not yet.” He arches a brow.

Erik just frowns at him and pushes forward once more. Charles clenches tight around him, Erik groaning and biting the sweeping line of Charles’s trapezius. Charles tilts his hips up, dragging Erik’s cock along the cleft of his arse, and lets his head drop to press his brow against the mattress.

Erik’s nails are digging into Charles’s flesh – and he is just this side of rough when he grasps Charles by the waist, using it as leverage to grind down into him more forcefully now. Charles can see Erik’s face out of the periphery of his vision; Erik’s lips are parted, his eyes barely staying open and fixated wholly on the sight of his own cock sliding between Charles’s cheeks.

It is a game, of course – to see how far Charles can push things, can push _Erik_ , without going too far. Without having him come before Charles wants him to. And Erik always does the same to him in return, both of them fighting for control over the other’s body - the other’s desire.

Charles waits until Erik is practically shaking with the effort of holding himself back … until he can feel Erik’s cock pulsing against him, until Erik cannot swallow his moans and they fall full and thick at the back of Charles’s neck.

“Now,” he says –

\-- and Erik does not waste a moment; he pushes himself into Charles in a single thrust – and Charles suddenly twists his fingers in the sheets, clenching his teeth to keep from crying out.

Erik is … much larger than he remembered, for one. The girth of him fills Charles up so entirely; it _hurts_ , a little, despite how well Charles had been prepared beforehand … or maybe that is just the impact of how … _rough_ it is, the way Erik drives himself into him, Erik gasping the broken syllables of Charles’s name against his shoulder blade.

Erik knows him well enough not to ask if he’s all right, even as Charles squeezes his eyes shut and presses his face down hard against the bed. He goes slowly, though, at first, drawing himself out just an inch or two before rocking forward again. Charles’s muscles have relaxed somewhat by the time Erik is moving in full rhythm, and it is not long before Charles is grinding his hips toward Erik once more and falling into a cadence of his own.

“ _Fuck_ ,” Erik groans, both arms winding round Charles’s body, holding them tight together even as the pace of his thrusts quickens. 

Charles laughs and shifts beneath him, just enough to send blood palpably throbbing through Erik’s cock. 

“Fuck,” Erik says again. “Fuck, _Charles,_ you –“ he breaks off into another moan, his entire body shuddering where it is pressed up against Charles’s. A moment later he is no longer attempting to speak; he just presses himself hard and hot into Charles - his mouth wet on Charles’s shoulder when he finally comes.

He clings to Charles for a while, afterward - their skin sticky and Charles’s sheets twisted messily beneath them. Erik’s breaths are arrhythmic, hot against the back of Charles’s ear. He curls his fingers around Erik’s forearm and closes his eyes. 

It isn’t everything, he thinks. But it’s something.

He wonders if this changes things between them. Sex always does.

And if it does change things, then he wonders what it means, for them to go back to work tomorrow. What it means, for thirteen months of silence.

Charles pushes those thoughts carefully away, tying them down in the corner of his mind to be looked at tomorrow, when his mind is in better shape. 

For now, there is only this. 

\--


	7. Chapter 7

PART SIX

“Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherized upon a table.”

-T.S. Eliot, _The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock_

\--

1.

When Erik wakes up, Charles is gone.

It is a first, for them; Erik always woke up first, before. Up at five, out for his run by five-fifteen, back and showered and at work by eight at the latest. (Charles, on the other hand, never rolled out of bed until nine unless he had an early shift.)

Erik rolls over and looks through sleep-blurred eyes at the clock on Charles’s bedside table. Seven-thirty. He has not woken up this late since he was an undergrad. 

He has a good excuse this time, he supposes. They had ended up wound together a total of three times the previous night: the second being half an hour after the first, and the third around four in the morning when Erik woke to Charles’s legs straddling his and Charles’s mouth at his neck.

Making up for lost time, he supposes.

Erik pushes himself out of bed and pads over to Charles’s dresser. He steals a pair of boxers (a size off, but there is nothing else for it) and heads downstairs. 

Charles is in the kitchen, poking morosely at a panful of burnt eggs. “’Morning,” he says when Erik comes up behind him, slipping his arms around Charles’s waist and kissing the nape of his neck. 

Erik makes an indistinguishable sound against Charles’s skin (it tastes warm, earthy in the morning) before he steps away, toward the coffee pot which – thank g-d – is already fully brewed. “Now I remember why I never let you make breakfast.”

“It’s not that bad,” Charles protests, unloading a spatula of eggs onto each of two plates. “It’s … salvageable, at least.”

Erik lifts a brow. “With salt. _Maybe_.” 

Charles frowns and carries the plates, now laden with (also burnt) toast and strawberries, to the table. The fruit looks safe, Erik thinks. There is not much one can do to mess up fruit.

“I got up early to make this for you,” Charles says, dropping down into the chair nearest the window. “The least you could do is _pretend_ to be enthusiastic about it.”

“My apologies.” Erik settles down in the other chair and takes a long, emboldening sip of his coffee. “It looks delicious.”

Charles gives him a faintly exasperated look and stabs at a strawberry with his fork. They eat in silence for several minutes – a more comfortable silence, now, Erik finds. Nothing at all like the tense muteness of just a few weeks before. Charles keeps darting glances up at him from beneath his lashes whenever he thinks Erik’s isn’t looking; Erik pretends not to notice, though he watches Charles over the rim of his coffee mug as Charles attempts to choke down another mouthful of his own cooking.

“What time are you going in today?” Charles asks at last, once he has polished off his eggs. Remarkably, he only looks a little bit green around the mouth.

“It’s my off day,” Erik says. “Maybe I won’t go in at all.” Charles lifts an eyebrow and says nothing – and finally, Erik is forced to concede: “Nine or nine-thirty.”

“I have a twenty-four hour shift coming up. It starts at ten.” Charles watches Erik, dragging the tines of his fork in broad circles atop his empty plate. “I won’t see you until tomorrow at the earliest.”

Erik catches Charles’s eye, and thinks he knows the real question Charles is asking. And it’s bold, of course, to phrase it that way: _I won’t see you until_ …. 

So he _does_ want to see Erik again, then. 

He is not aware of whether or not Erik returns the sentiment, so he has gone for the gambit, bringing his knight forward and leaving his kingside open at the flank. 

It’s a ploy: version one hundred and one of Charles’s little games. But Erik finds he does not mind this particular round.

“Maybe we could meet for lunch,” Erik says, carefully casual.

Charles grins.

“Yes. I’d like that.”

“Good.”

“Good. I’ll text you, with where.”

Erik makes the mistake of taking a bite of his eggs, to fill the silence; he does his best not to gag too obviously. Charles drops another cube of sugar into his tea and stirs counterclockwise, his spoon scraping against the china from time to time. It is several moments before Erik realizes that there is something else to the downward curve of Charles’s lips, besides mere morning grumpiness.

“Erik,” Charles says at last, still watching his tea spin round, “why _didn’t_ you mention the cut in Ira Burns’s aorta in your report? Because it’s not just that you didn’t declare it cause of death. You didn’t bring it up at all.”

Charles steals a glance up at Erik from beneath his lashes, but does not hold his gaze for long. Erik gets the feeling that Charles has been planning this question ever since he woke up this morning.

“I didn’t cover for you, if that’s what you’re implying,” Erik says, lifting his coffee back to his mouth. “You will recall I wrote at length about the quality of the sutures along the patient’s aortic arch.”

“None of them were broken?” Charles asks, his voice soft.

“None of them were broken.”

Charles fiddles with the end of his spoon, twisting it back and forth between thumb and index finger. “But …” he begins – and he pulls his lower lip between his teeth, chewing on it for a moment before he says, “But how can you _know_? That it’s ipecac cardiomyopathy, I mean. How do you know it wasn’t something else?”

Erik frowns. “Did you even _read_ my report?”

Charles has the grace, at least, to look offended. “Of course I did!”

“Then stop asking stupid questions.” 

Charles still looks upset, so Erik sighs and tries again.

“Look,” he says. “The autopsy was completely conclusive. It was ipecac. The heart was … _significantly_ weakened. Frankly, I’m surprised it lasted as long as it did, if he had been putting it through that much abuse over the past six months.”

… G-d, but Charles is going to wear a hole in his lip if he keeps nibbling away at it like that. 

“I know what I’m doing, all right?” Erik scowls. “I’m a pathologist. It’s just something you know. You have to _feel_ it.”

One of Charles’s brows arches upward. “I hope you have something better than that on the stand, my friend.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Charles. You’re not going on _trial_.”

Charles twirls his spoon in his teacup once more. “It’s best to be prepared, I think,” he says. “You weren’t wrong last night. The fact that my mistake was not what killed Ira Burns does not make it any less careless on my part.” 

Erik shrugs his shoulder. “I wouldn’t call the slip itself ‘careless.’ It was accidental. But you still should have said something.”

Charles nods. “I know that now,” he says. Finally, he sets the spoon down on his saucer. This time, he does not pick it up again.

Erik stands, draining the rest of his coffee and bringing his dishes with him over to the sink. 

“I’m sorry,” he says, dumping the burnt eggs and toast down the disposal. “There’s no saving this.”

He does not expect a smile – but at least Charles’s posture has relaxed somewhat by the time Erik turns back around, slouching slightly in his chair so that the line of his back forms a soft, elongated C.

“There’s cereal in the cabinet if you want it,” Charles tells him.

And just like that, things settle back down, drifting back in time to two years ago, when they still smiled at each other over breakfast and stole toast off each other’s plates. When they loved each other naively, without expectation or demand.

It feels strange, Erik thinks, and a little uncomfortable, like an old coat one has not worn for a while. But not bad.

Not bad at all.

\--

2.

Of course, all good things must come to an end.

When Erik gets to work, Shaw is still there. Still alive and sharing Erik’s hospital. He catches sight of him on his way to the path lab, Shaw tall enough to stand a head above the crowd with his white coat newly-pressed, fiddling with his Droid as an intern stumbles her way through a morning report at his side.

Erik gets his coffee quickly and heads down to the basement before Shaw can call him over, burying himself under the landslide of new paperwork that has come down the wire overnight. There is an email from the editor of _Acta Neuropathologica_ \-- “Dear Dr. Lehnsherr, we are pleased to inform you” -- his paper has been accepted for publication. He closes that window and pulls up a chart in its place.

He has his desktop alarm set for noon. It goes off when he is halfway done reading a set of slides and Erik sets it to ring again in ten minutes.

But he finishes quickly, after that, typing his report into the system and slotting the slides back into their box to be referenced again at a later time.

\--

3.

They meet halfway across the bridge.

Charles is there when Erik arrives, leaning against the guard rail -- facing away from the train tracks, looking out across the river. He has buttoned his coat all the way up, scarf bundled underneath his chin, but his cheeks are scarlet from the chill: a shade that draws Erik’s attention even from twenty feet away.

He does not glance over until Erik is nearly upon him, close enough that Erik can see each individual strand of hair as it tugs and tangles across Charles’s brow, caught up in the rising wind. 

“Are you cold?” Erik asks, thinking of offering him the rest of his coffee. It’s still hot.

Charles shakes his head and smiles. “No,” he says. “Not really.” He looks back out onto the water after a moment, gloved fingers lacing together over the edge of the rail. “It’s surprisingly warm, actually, for winter -- don’t you think?”

Erik decides not to mention the color in Charles’s cheeks after all.

Charles is right. It is, in fact, rather warm. 

Erik comes to stand next to Charles, one foot up on the curb at the edge of the bridge, close enough to feel the heat radiating from Charles’s body. The river has caught the blue of the sky in its reflection and turned the color deeper, shifting toward shadow where the wind catches the water, flowing slowly out to sea.

“I had rounds with Shaw this morning,” Charles says eventually. Erik looks toward him but Charles is still gazing out toward the horizon and does not seem to notice. “We had a patient together a few days ago.”

Erik’s attention snags at that, his eyes narrowing. 

Charles’s gaze drops. It is a few seconds before he looks back to Erik, his lips set into a frown. “He’s not going to stop, is he?”

Erik shakes his head. 

“No.”

Charles’s jaw goes tight and he lifts a hand, fingers dragging back through his hair. He has that twitch in his temple, the one that tells Erik he is thinking very hard about something very unpleasant.

“He won’t have the chance,” Charles says, once the twitch finally goes still. “He won’t kill anyone else, ever again.” His hand is on Erik’s arm, near the elbow. “We will take care of this, Erik. I promise.”

Strangely enough, Erik actually believes him.

\--

4.

Erik has dinner at that sandwich shop down the street from the hospital, his hoagie in one hand and his tablet in the other, skimming through the latest meta-analysis in _The Journal of Neuropathology and Experimental Neurology_. 

He is sitting there, crammed into the small plastic seat of the booth, leaning with one elbow on the windowsill to avoid the suspiciously sticky tabletop, when the woman approaches.

“Excuse me,” she says. “Are you Erik Lehnsherr?”

He looks up. It is obvious she is a doctor, from her flat shoes and the pager clipped to her pocket, even if she is not wearing a white coat. 

She is tall – almost as tall as Erik himself, with dark skin and a _don’t-fuck-with-me_ look on her face. Erik doesn't know her, but he is tempted to like her. 

He nods.

“I’m Cecilia Reyes,” she says. “Trauma surgeon at MGH. Do you have a minute to talk?”

Erik hesitates for a moment. He does not know this woman. He certainly doesn’t know whom he can trust in trauma, if indeed he can trust anyone. But what does he gain from declining? He can at least hear what she wants, and then he can make further decisions as necessary.

After all … he thinks, maybe – just maybe – he knows what this is about.

And if he is correct …. The last time he fought this battle, he did it alone, cutting himself off completely from anyone who might have been willing to help. And maybe Charles has a point. Maybe the isolation is what ruined him, every bit as much as Shaw’s manipulations.

“A minute,” he agrees.

She slides into the booth across from him, clasping both hands together atop the table, her gaze holding his with an unblinking steadiness. “I know what happened at New York Presbyterian, with you and Shaw,” she says. “I looked him up. It’s buried deep, but I was able to get the records from the investigation.” 

Erik immediately feels the tension creeping into the line of his shoulders, drawing like a metal wire down the center of his spine. 

“I think it’s happening again,” Reyes tells him. “Here. I don’t have solid evidence yet, but there’s been enough to make me suspicious. Plenty of homeless men and junkies who disappear into his OR and never come out again.” She is watching him, Erik thinks; trying to gauge his response. “Minor injuries, the sorts of things that should be fixed in a two-hour procedure, but there’s always some kind of –“ an arched brow, Reyes’ mouth twisting slightly “ – _complication_.”

If nothing else, Erik cannot say he is surprised. 

The arrogance of it, of course, is astounding; for Shaw, newly tenured in the same hospital as his accuser, to already fall back into his old habits. How long has he been here? How many weeks - how many procedures? He is mocking Erik, no doubt … and trusting that Erik will never be able to fight back.

It is realistic enough – and Erik expects it, enough – that he believes her. For the time being, at least. So he grits his teeth and nods, once, hoping Reyes will take it as her cue to continue.

She does. “I’m not going to stand by and let this happen. But as much as I hate to admit it, I can’t take him down without help. I’m going to need access to your reports from before, and anything that you can get on him from here at Mass General.”

“I can’t do an autopsy unless there’s an order for it,” Erik points out. “It’s illegal.”

“You let me handle that,” Reyes says. “I can get you the orders. You just need to carry them out. … _Thoroughly_.”

Erik feels a wide, grim smile stretching itself across his lips. 

Shaw is his. Shaw has _always_ been his. His to take down. His to destroy. It feels as if the last four years have been nothing but a race toward this point, when he may at last have an opportunity to link his reports to the account of a surgical eyewitness. In his mind, he can see Shaw’s face the moment he realizes it’s over: the faint lift of surprise, the downward sag of despair. Disbelief, corrugating the skin between his brows. 

Erik looks at Reyes across the table and his grin stretches out into something more like a grimace, baring all teeth, and he says:

“That, I can do.”

\--

5.

Erik goes home at night and Charles is there, waiting for him, sitting out on the front stoop with his chin on his knees and one hand toying at the screen of his smartphone.

“Have you been waiting long?” Erik asks as Charles pushes himself up, tucking the phone into the back pocket of his trousers. 

Charles shrugs. “Not really,” he says.

“Do you want to come in?”

“Please.”

Charles follows Erik into the house - and when they are in Erik’s bedroom, he sits down on Erik’s bed without waiting for Erik’s invitation. It should be abrasive, but it isn’t. Not when, for a brief moment, all Erik can think about is how he had looked the previous night: bright-eyed and desperate, all but writhing beneath him. 

Erik pushes that thought firmly away, tells himself _not now_ when his cock starts to take an interest. He sits down next to Charles and Charles immediately reaches over, slipping his hand along Erik’s cheek to draw him in and bring their lips softly together. 

Erik closes his eyes and allows himself, just for a while, to appreciate the warm sphere of liquid iron that swells within his chest – the way his mouth parts easily to allow Charles’s tongue access – even the way his own hand slides down Charles’s shoulder to his upper arm … the familiar slope of it, the quiet sound Charles makes when Erik’s teeth catch on his lower lip.

Charles breaks the kiss first, surprisingly, though he doesn’t go far; he simply tilts their brows together, fingers still playing at the back of Erik’s neck, his lips kiss-stung and smiling. “You seem quiet,” he says.

Erik does not answer. Instead he lets his hand drop down still further, to the long line of Charles’s ulna - and then inward, to the soft underside of Charles’s wrist. He feels the minute, reflexive flex of Charles’s tendons as he tries very hard to keep his own arm from moving, to keep Erik’s fingers pressed just-there.

“Is something wrong?” Charles probes further, after several seconds have passed in silence.

Erik realizes his gaze has gotten caught on Charles’s wrist, on the net of thin blue veins running beneath his skin. He lifts his eyes back up to meet Charles’s and closes his fingers around Charles’s arm; to prevent the distraction, he tells himself.

“Someone approached me today,” he says. “A trauma surgeon who has been working closely with Shaw. She told me – “ he breaks off for a moment. “It’s happening again, she said.”

Charles tries to keep his expression neutral. He tries, but Erik still sees the rapid progression of emotions that flit across the smaller muscles of his face. Shock – disgust – sobriety – hope – then, dismay. 

“I see,” Charles says.

“She wants me to work with her. She said she wants me to help her take him down.”

Charles’s hand has migrated upward a bit and is now combing through the hair at the back of Erik’s head, the drag of his fingers slow. Gentle. “How do you know it’s not a ruse?” he asks. “What if she’s _with Shaw?_ What if this is just him, trying to ruin your career?”

“I don’t care.”

Charles’s brows lift, but only slightly.

“If she’s playing me, and if I lose my job over this – well, so be it. At least I will have done everything I could to stop him.” Because if Reyes is telling the truth, and he ignores it …. Every body Shaw leaves behind will be on _his_ head. Their blood, on his hands. His career matters little when something so much more important is on the line. 

Erik thinks of his mother – of how she was when she wasn’t on the drugs, when she’d take him out places: to the park, to watch the carp swimming in the pond, big and blue and gold and scarlet-red, darting out of the shadows like jewel-bright sparks of light, glittering in the reflection from the sun. His mother giving him a handful of bread crumbs and telling him to toss them in the water. Her hand resting on his shoulder - and he was so happy just being with her that he barely even noticed the fish when they swam up, boldly, to eat the crumbs.

He thinks how, in that moment, he thought he would have her with him – forever.

Charles’s hand slips down over Erik’s neck, down the long curve of his spine, until it drops away, onto the bed. 

“I understand,” Charles says.

Erik kisses him again: chastely this time, their lips barely meeting before he pulls away. Charles moves down the bed to lean against Erik’s headboard, drawing his knees up and locking his arms around his shins.

“Charles –“ Erik begins.

“I can help you.” Charles’s knuckles are blanched where he grasps his own elbows. “I can keep an eye on his work in surgery. I’ll watch this accomplice of yours, too. … Just in case.” 

Erik frowns, but before he can speak, Charles is already continuing:

“Let me help you. Please. It’s – if it’s the only thing I can do, then … please.”

He looks up at Erik, and even though his throat shifts slightly, Adam’s apple quivering as he swallows, his mouth is set. Determined.

“All right,” Erik concedes at last, his gaze sliding down away from Charles’s. 

“Thank you.” 

He still feels Charles watching him, waiting for him to speak again. Erik can feel everything they are not discussing, hanging heavy in the air between, caught on the tips of both their tongues. It is familiar, this silence. It is silent in the tradition of the many previous silences between them, of thoughts and words gone unspoken, time dropping away with every tick of the clock on Erik’s wall. 

Erik cannot stand the idea of any more silence. 

He looks up.

“You know we need to talk,” he says.

If Erik is not mistaken, Charles actually looks faintly relieved. “About what?”

“About … us,” Erik says. “About what happened last night. Where we plan to go from here.”

Charles lets go of his elbows, hands dropping down to cross in front of his ankles instead. He wets his lips – bites them - and Erik thinks he knows, before Charles even speaks, what he is going to say.

“Erik, I don’t … I don’t think I can do this. It’s not – I meant what I said, the other day. It’s not that. But we broke up for a reason.” Charles’s mouth is violently red now, with the way he is chewing on it. “I wasn’t ready to be in a serious relationship when you and I got together, and honestly, I’m not sure that I am ready now, either. And you ….”

“I know,” Erik says, because Charles is starting to look faintly distraught. He reaches out and catches one of Charles’s hands with his own, squeezing gently. “You’re right. This isn’t going to work. Not right now, at least.”

Not while Shaw is still here, still doing his bloody work in Erik’s own hospital. Not while Erik has a chance to stop him. 

“I know I’ve been … difficult to get along with,” Erik says. “My work is important to me, and perhaps I have … perhaps I’ve been sacrificing too much.” There is something too bright in Charles’s eyes, a wetness to his lower lashes that Erik pretends not to see as he runs his thumb along the back of Charles’s hand. “I’m …. I never meant for you to feel – “ What was it that Charles had said? How had he put it? “—abandoned.”

Charles nods slowly, and after a moment he turns his hand palm-up in Erik’s, and squeezes him back. 

“I admire what you’re doing,” he says. “I really do. And you know I will stand by you through all of it.” He takes in a small, shuddering breath, and visibly steels himself. “But as your friend, not your lover. If I help you, and Shaw were to catch wind of us being together –“

If Shaw found out, it would end very poorly for Charles. _Xavier wants the chiefship_ , Shaw would say. _He wants to ruin me, and he’s having Lehnsherr, his_ lover, _drag up all of his old accusations in an attempt to smear my name_.

Shaw cannot know that Erik has anything that might be perceived as a weakness. He cannot have any reason to dig further into their relationship – he cannot know how Erik feels about Charles, he cannot suspect that there may have been anything more to Ira Burns’s autopsy than what Erik wrote in his report.

“So we’ll wait, then,” Erik says. “We do what we have to do, and we take Shaw down.”

Charles smiles, even if a bit thinly. “Yes,” he says. “We wait.”

A few seconds pass, and then Erik lifts their clasped hands to brush a kiss against the backs of Charles’s knuckles. “I love you.”

He hears the catch of Charles’s breath in the back of his throat, sees the quick dart of his tongue out against his lower lip. Then Charles is leaning forward, pulling his hand from Erik’s only to wrap both arms around his neck, resting his chin on Erik’s shoulder. 

Erik buries his nose in Charles’s hair, and closes his eyes.

If it is the last time he touches Charles for months – for a year – then he wants to remember. He does not know how long they will have to pretend, how long they must play at distant acquaintanceship, lest even the appearance of friendship be too much of a risk. He does not know how long it will be until Charles is ready. Until _he_ is ready. 

But when he is … when _they_ are … Erik wants to remember their last touch like this --

\-- Charles’s breath on his neck. His fingers twisting fists in the fabric of his shirt, the warm spread of Charles’s back beneath his hands. A curl of Charles’s hair brushing against his cheek, and the soft pulse of Charles’s heart beat beneath his lips when he kisses him just below the line of his jaw. 

He stores this moment up. He wraps it in silk and tucks it into the back corner of his mind.

A tiny light: the brightest of memories.

\--

6.

_Epilogue_

_Six weeks later_

Erik goes to work at eight in the morning, and he leaves after the last train has long left the station to walk home alone. The only exception is Chanukah, later that winter, when he rushes home before dusk falls to light the candles in his kitchen. The menorah he sets on the table in front of the window, amidst a scattered pile of reports and articles and photographs of drawn-open cadavers turned respectfully face-down.

He sees Charles in the hall every now and then: sometimes alone, sometimes walking with another surgeon, sometimes with his sister – and always their eyes meet, they trade smiles or small nods –

\-- and then they continue past, each moving on to their own destination, their own goal. 

They rarely speak. They rarely see each other. …And yet Erik feels Charles’s presence in the notes he appends to Cecilia Reyes’ reports - in the samples he sends down for Erik to biopsy, in the vase of white chrysanthemums that appeared on Erik’s desk one day – flowers he kept and cared for until the blooms withered away and he came to work to find they had been replaced with blue violets instead. 

Erik stands on the bridge. The train is running late; it should have arrived three minutes ago. But the night is dark and warm, so Erik does not mind.

There is a folder full of paperwork under his arm, the pages covered with words that he hopes will save someone’s life. 

He leans against the guard rail, facing the horizon. 

He looks out at the water, and he waits.


End file.
